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Signs Of Water Are Found On The Moon... See How Much

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Mandy Esser
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« on: September 24, 2009, 11:07:58 am »

Signs Of Water Are Found On The Moon... See How Much


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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #1 on: September 24, 2009, 11:09:59 am »

Moon Water: Probes Find H20 Traces In Dirt
SETH BORENSTEIN | 09/23/09 05:42 PM | 



WASHINGTON — The moon isn't the dry dull place it seems. Traces of water lurk in the dirt unseen.

Three different space probes found the chemical signature of water all over the moon's surface, surprising the scientists who at first doubted the unexpected measurement until it was confirmed independently and repeatedly.

It's not enough moisture to foster homegrown life on the moon. But if processed in mass quantities, it might provide resources – drinking water and rocket fuel – for future moon-dwellers, scientists say. The water comes and goes during the lunar day.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

"It's sort of just sticking on the surface," Sunshine said. "We always think of the moon as dead and this is sort of a dynamic process that's going on."

The discovery, with three studies bring published in the journal Science on Thursday and a NASA briefing, could refocus interest in the moon. The appeal of the moon waned after astronauts visited 40 years ago and called it "magnificent desolation."

The announcement comes two weeks before a NASA probe purposely smashes near the moon's south pole to see if it can kick up buried ice. Over the last decade, astronomers have found some signs of underground ice on the moon's poles. But this latest discovery is quite different. It finds unexpected and pervasive water clinging to the surface of soil, not absorbed into it.

"It is drier than any desert we have here," Sunshine said.


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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #2 on: September 24, 2009, 11:11:10 am »

The water was spotted by spacecraft that either circled the moon or flew by. All three ships used the same type of instrument that looked at the absorption of a specific wavelength of light that is the chemical signature of only two molecules: water and hydroxyl. Hydroxyl is one atom of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, instead of two hydrogen atoms in water.

Because of the timing during the daylight when some of that wavelength disappears and some doesn't, it shows that both hydroxyl and water are present, Sunshine said.

This light wavelength was first discovered by an instrument on the Indian lunar satellite Chandrayaan-1, which stopped operating last month. Scientists initially figured something was wrong with the instrument because everyone knew the moon did not have a drop of water on the surface, Pieters said.

"We argued literally for months amongst ourselves to find out where the problem was," Pieters said. Sunshine, who was on the team, had a similar instrument on NASA's Deep Impact probe, headed for a comet but swinging by the moon in June. So Deep Impact looked for the water-hydroxyl signature – and found it.

Scientists also looked back at the records of NASA's Cassini probe, which is circling Saturn. It has the same type instrument and whizzed by the moon ten years ago. Sure enough, it had found the same thing.

The chance that three different instruments malfunctioned in the same way on three different spaceships is almost zilch, so this confirms that it's water and hydroxyl, Pieters said.

"There's just no question that it's there," Pieters said. "It's unequivocal."

Scientists testing lunar samples returned to Earth by astronauts did find traces of water, but they had figured it was contamination from moisture in Earth air, Pieters said.

Three scientists who were not part of the team of discoverers said the conclusion makes sense, with Arizona State University's Ron Greeley using the same word as Pieters: unequivocal.

Lunar and Planetary Institute senior scientist Paul Spudis called it exciting and said it raises the logical question: Where did that water come from?

Pieters figures there are three possibilities: It came from comets or asteroids that crashed into the moon, those crashes freed up trapped water from below the surface, or the solar wind carries hydrogen atoms that binds with oxygen in the dirt. That final possibility is the one that Sunshine and Pieters both prefer.

If it is the solar wind, that also means that other places without atmosphere in our solar system, such as Mercury or asteroids, can also have bits of water, Sunshine said.

___

On the Net

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/its-not-lunacy-probes-fin_0_n_297181.html



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/its-not-lunacy-probes-fin_0_n_297181.html
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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #3 on: September 24, 2009, 11:12:18 am »

It's Official: Water Found on the Moon
By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 23 September 2009
06:17 pm ET
 


This story was updated at 10:49 p.m. EDT.

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said. 

"If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the three studies in Science on the lunar find, in a statement. "This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it."

Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #4 on: September 24, 2009, 11:12:34 am »

Apollo turns up dry

When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back several samples of lunar rocks.

The moon rocks were analyzed for signs of water bound to minerals present in the rocks; while trace amounts of water were detected, these were assumed to be contamination from Earth, because the containers the rocks came back in had leaked.

"The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth," said Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is a member of one of the NASA-built instrument teams for India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite and has studied the moon since the Apollo missions.

While scientists continued to suspect that water ice deposits could be found in the coldest spots of south pole craters that never saw sunlight, the consensus became that the rest of the moon was bone dry.

But new observations of the lunar surface made with Chandrayaan-1, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and NASA's Deep Impact probe, are calling that consensus into question, with multiple detections of the spectral signal of either water or the hydroxyl group (an oxygen and hydrogen chemically bonded).
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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #5 on: September 24, 2009, 11:12:55 am »

Three spacecraft

Chandrayaan-1, India's first-ever moon probe, was aimed at mapping the lunar surface and determining its mineral composition (the orbiter's mission ended 14 months prematurely in August after an abrupt malfunction). While the probe was still active, its NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected wavelengths of light reflected off the surface that indicated the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen — the telltale sign of either water or hydroxyl.

Because M3 can only penetrate the top few millimeters of lunar regolith, the newly observed water seems to be at or near the lunar surface. M3's observations also showed that the water signal got stronger toward the polar regions. Pieters is the lead investigator for the M3 instrument on Chandrayaan-1.

Cassini, which passed by the moon in 1999 on its way to Saturn, provides confirmation of this signal with its own slightly stronger detection of the water/hydroxyl signal. The water would have to be absorbed or trapped in the glass and minerals at the lunar surface, wrote Roger Clark of the U.S. Geological Survey in the study detailing Cassini's findings.

The Cassini data shows a global distribution of the water signal, though it also appears stronger near the poles (and low in the lunar maria).

Finally, the Deep Impact spacecraft, as part of its extended EPOXI mission and at the request of the M3 team, made infrared detections of water and hydroxyl as part of a calibration exercise during several close approaches of the Earth-Moon system en route to its planned flyby of comet 103P/Hartley 2 in November 2010.

Deep Impact detected the signal at all latitudes above 10 degrees N, though once again, the poles showed the strongest signals. With its multiple passes, Deep Impact was able to observe the same regions at different times of the lunar day. At noon, when the sun's rays were strongest, the water feature was lowest, while in the morning, the feature was stronger.

"The Deep Impact observations of the Moon not only unequivocally confirm the presence of [water/hydroxyl] on the lunar surface, but also reveal that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day," the authors wrote in their study.

The findings of all three spacecraft "provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water," said Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii in an opinion essay accompanying the three studies. Lucey was not involved in any of the missions.

The new data "prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the moon is dry. It is not," Lucey wrote.

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Mandy Esser
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« Reply #6 on: September 24, 2009, 11:16:09 am »

Where the water comes from

Combined, the findings show that not only is the moon hydrated, the process that makes it so is a dynamic one that is driven by the daily changes in solar radiation hitting any given spot on the surface.

The sun might also have something to do with how the water got there.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: that brought from outside sources, such as water-bearing comets striking the surface, or that that originates on the moon.

This second, endogenic, source is thought to possibly come from the interaction of the solar wind with moon rocks and soils.

The rocks and regolith that make up the lunar surface are about 45 percent oxygen (combined with other elements as mostly silicate minerals). The solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles emitted by the sun — are mostly protons, or positively charged hydrogen atoms.

If the charged hydrogens, which are traveling at one-third the speed of light, hit the lunar surface with enough force, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, Taylor, the M3 team member suspects. Where free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there is a high chance that trace amounts of water will form.

The various study researchers also suggest that the daily dehydration and rehydration of the trace water across the surface could lead to the migration of hydroxyl and hydrogen towards the poles where it can accumulate in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.

Video - Target Moon: NASA's New Lunar Scouts, Part 2
Prospect of Water Ice Spurs Excitement for Moon Exploration
Top 10 Amazing Moon Facts
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html
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Volitzer
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« Reply #7 on: September 24, 2009, 11:59:45 am »

There are lakes and rivers on the moon near the Mare Cruzium area not to mention thriving human and alien civilizations.  Not to mention a 5 psi ( 34.464 Kilo-Pascals) atmosphere.

I've seen photos of actual clouds on the moon.

Earth/Venus has a 14.7 psi = 101,325 Pascals or 101.325 Kilo-Pascals

What a load of crap from NASA.

NASA - Never A Straight Answer
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Robert0326
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« Reply #8 on: September 24, 2009, 01:50:04 pm »

You've been watching too much YouTube Volitzer.
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Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."     Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823 -Thomas Jefferson
Volitzer
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« Reply #9 on: September 24, 2009, 03:07:38 pm »

No I have it from first hand experience from someone who actually went there.

http://www.gafintl-adamski.com/html/AboutGA.htm
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Robert0326
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« Reply #10 on: September 24, 2009, 03:15:15 pm »

But I thought all conspiracy theorists like yourself don't believe we've even been to the moon.
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Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."     Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823 -Thomas Jefferson
Volitzer
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« Reply #11 on: September 24, 2009, 03:27:03 pm »

But I thought all conspiracy theorists like yourself don't believe we've even been to the moon.

Well now you're just being prejudice.    Wink Wink Grin Grin Grin Grin
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Robert0326
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« Reply #12 on: September 25, 2009, 01:33:59 am »

How am I being prejudice?  I'm just stating the facts.  Take Jim Marrs for instance.  I watched a documentary a few years ago I think it was called "Conspiracy Moon Landing".  Which by the way is absolutely hilarious especially with the other nut case that lives with the thousand cats and says that he worked for NASA during the Apollo program.  Marrs professes that we never have been to the moon.  And yet he believes in aliens.   Roll Eyes
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Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."     Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823 -Thomas Jefferson
Mandy Esser
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« Reply #13 on: September 25, 2009, 11:00:39 am »

Boy, now my respect for Jim Marrs just went way down. If I am remembering correctly, he is the one that did a lot of research into the Kennedy Assasination.
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Volitzer
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« Reply #14 on: September 25, 2009, 11:27:22 am »

www.gafintl-adamski.com

UFOs and the Complete Evidence from Space; Dan Ross




Best sources I have found for active atmospheres on Venus, the moon, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Nibiru.  Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and humans living underground.
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