[HN Gopher] Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
___________________________________________________________________
Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 181 points
Date : 2023-04-14 04:33 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| ath3nd wrote:
| Oh, goody, can't wait for Nestle to buy up the land and sell it
| for 100x profit.
| pvaldes wrote:
| That's a really interesting twist.
|
| Could <$big company> legally pour a lot of money to assure
| control over a parcel or a mine in Mars?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Legality will not be a very easily enforced facade if those
| who don't have "legal rights" have the means of getting to
| that parcel, taking it and keeping it. Not gonna be _that_
| much different than the Age of Discovery. Except, you know,
| no Natives to enslave /kill/influence/exploit/befriend/ally
| with.
| bassrattle wrote:
| >NASA'sArtemis program is looking for ice in shadowed craters
| near the moon's south pole
|
| I thought shadowed moon craters stay at roughly 63 degrees?
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| It's only a matter of time now before we get the first craft
| brewery and tap room on the Moon.
| drtgh wrote:
| The radiation level exposure on the Moon is estimated to be
| around 60 microsieverts every hour [1], while the limit of
| amount of radiation received by the general public in a year is
| set to 1'000 microsieverts (1 millisievert) [2].
|
| It would then be necessary to be achieved the regenerative
| medicine in the first place, with a major revolution in
| radiation shielding technology.
|
| Unfortunately does not appear to be on the verge of being a
| reality (in short term?), if one look with cold eyes the
| current state of medicine is amputation.
|
| [1] https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/the-threat-of-
| space-r...
|
| [2] https://www.jaea.go.jp/english/jishin/kaisetsu01.pdf
| ericd wrote:
| Couldn't that taproom be subterranean? I assume that 10m of
| regolith is a fine radiation shield?
| stametseater wrote:
| 60 microseverts an hour works out to about 525 millisieverts
| (mSv) per year. The general public limit is set very low, so
| for additional reference, the annual limit for emergency
| worker was raised to 250 mSv per year after Fukushima, half
| of what you'd get on the Moon. An _effective dose_ (whole
| body, sum of all equivalent doses for the organs) of 200 mSv
| is enough to increase your risk of fatal cancer from 25% to
| 26%, so 525 mSv obviously represents a substantial stochastic
| risk.
|
| The ICRP occupational _equivalent dose_ limit for hands, feet
| and skin are 500 mSv per year, so for these you 're under the
| limit (the 525 mSv effective dose above is spread across you,
| not on one organ). However the equivalent dose limit for eyes
| is 20 mSv average with no more than 50 mSv per year. I
| haven't done the math but I think 525 mSv effective dose over
| a year would put you at substantial risk of deterministic
| damage to the lenses of your eyes.
|
| In other words, Moon men probably get cataracts and are more
| likely to die of cancer.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| If water is plentiful and accessible, that could be used as
| shielding, no?
| drtgh wrote:
| It is not my field, but if plentiful and accessible, we are
| talking about several thousand tonnes of water around a
| small habitat that could _theoretically_ be used.
| Nevertheless, if I understood right, that immense amount of
| water would have a limited shelf life until acidification
| corrodes the containment structures, so it would need to be
| continuously treated and refrigerated,
|
| " Ionizing cosmic radiation is mostly gamma rays and
| protons, which are overall very similar to the radiation
| from nuclear waste. Protons are slightly lighter and so
| would have less energy at a given velocity (more easily
| stopped); but, because they're protons, if captured by the
| water they'd basically become H+ ions which could acidify
| the shielding water in time (not seen as much with nuclear
| waste). " [1]
|
| [1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1336/what-
| thicknes...
| burnished wrote:
| Any notion of the rate of that acidification? I can't
| imagine its happening quickly, still very fun to think
| about
| stametseater wrote:
| Chemically neutralizing the shielding water should be
| trivial. But why would the water need to be refrigerated?
| Energy absorbed from radiation would be emitted as
| thermal radiation, and lose a ton of thermal energy
| during the long lunar nights. If well insulated, the
| water tanks could serve as thermal batteries to keep the
| rest of the base warm.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I did a few rounds with an AI on this topic, so excuse me
| if there are inaccuracies, _but_ :
|
| - According to a study conducted NASA, a 1 mm layer of
| polyethylene reduces solar and cosmic radiation by
| approximately 50%
|
| - A 1mm, 1m^2 layer of polyethylene weighs approximately
| 0.92kg
|
| Maybe the polyethylene would decay, but maybe it can also
| be remanufactured, harvesting the contaminates in the
| meanwhile?
|
| That said, this all implies that working under a
| polyethylene sheet of 5mm would reduce exposure to about
| 33 mSv a year (assume 8hrs a day working on surface, 260
| days/yr).
|
| That said, Maybe robots can work on the surface instead?
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder how tall the foam would go in 1/6th g.
| brookst wrote:
| Look, we've told you a thousand times, we are _not_ sending a
| keg of beer on your Artemis mission. Now get back to
| studying, it's a long day today.
| ainiriand wrote:
| Or, real moonshine.
| taylorius wrote:
| That sounds like something Elon would add on the side of a
| future moon-based fuel making plant. :-)
| codebje wrote:
| That place has nice beer, but no atmosphere.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| This is a good joke. Although the moon does actually have a
| tiny atmosphere.
| burnished wrote:
| What is it composed of? My uneducated guess was that it was
| full vacuum on the lunar surface
| TheMerovingian wrote:
| But the moonshine is fantastic!
| SEJeff wrote:
| And their outdoor seating is terrible. One might call it
| suffocating.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| The staff are a bit a let down, there's this one human
| spieces person who keeps mumbling on about how he ruled
| something called Twitter back in 2023 AD.
| Svip wrote:
| I am still waiting on them to put casks on a space ship, put it
| in orbit, and ship it back to Earth, like Linie Aquavit
| crossing the equator twice.[0] Space Aquavit (or Rumakvavit, if
| you will) will surely be a thing.
|
| [0] https://linie.com/products/linie-aquavit-original/
| jasrys wrote:
| Already a thing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
| europe-56992086
| komain7 wrote:
| Not for long. Wait until this greedy virus called humans comes
| along. Takes everything without having the slightest clue of the
| long-term implications. All the intellect makes them think they
| are god-like yet all of the creations look like Frankenstein.
| komain7 wrote:
| Not for long. Wait until this greedy virus called humans comes
| along. Takes everything without having the slightest clue of the
| long-term implications. All the intellect makes them think they
| are god-like yet all of the creations look like Frankenstein. Lol
| credit_guy wrote:
| Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only
| theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are
| not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would
| need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before
| extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have
| 100% efficiency, which you will not have.
|
| If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big
| problems: we won't be able to source easily carbon, hydrogen and
| nitrogen. I predict that when we'll have such colonies, the
| phrase "you're worth your weight in gold" will mean you are
| useless, since your weight in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen will
| exceed many times your weight in gold (which can be sourced
| locally). Similarly, "you're full of shit" will be a high form of
| praise, since shit will be thoroughly recycled and highly
| valuable.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| a recent megaprojects video claimed harvesting water from
| asteroids was more worth the time and money than to do the same
| for rare earth metals.
|
| apparently bringing tons of rare earth metals back to earth
| would only lower their price and therefore not make the trip
| worth the money, but i guess this isn't a problem for the water
| that those asteroid might hold as that would still be not only
| valuable but worth the expense of harvesting it from asteroids.
|
| if the moon is closer, and not only less complicated to harvest
| from but has the advantage that you can keep a permanent
| drilling rig set up without needing to re-land on a complicated
| surface every single time, that would seem better than
| harvesting water from asteroids to me
| NickM wrote:
| That seems like a bizarre take. Even with efficient fully
| reusable rockets, surely desalination will still be much
| cheaper than mining water from asteroids and bringing it back
| to Earth?
|
| And sure, maybe bringing huge amounts of rare earth metals
| back might reduce the price a bit, but to the point where
| rare earth elements are cheaper per mass unit than _water_?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| If we ever have a space elevator bringing water down from
| space could actually be a net negative expense, since you
| could be using the weight to carry stuff up out of the
| gravity well.
| Tagbert wrote:
| "If we ever have a space elevator" such a simple phrase
| doing a lot of rhetorical lifting. The logistics and
| problems of space elevators make them extremely unlikely
| in any timeframe that is less than fantasy.
| throwawaymoon wrote:
| [flagged]
| alex_young wrote:
| Seems like the 28 day, uh, day will be a bigger problem.
| Everything from keeping power on for 14 days without solar to
| keeping the temperature up to human habitability levels will be
| challenging won't it?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a different kind of problem. The Moon is a big ball of
| stuff outside of the Earth's gravity.
|
| If that's stuff is valuable, then the Moon is a very valuable
| target, and there is a reason to solve problems like the 28
| days long day. If that's stuff isn't valuable, then the size
| of the day is an insurmountable issue.
| Firadeoclus wrote:
| Certainly, getting those elements in larger quantities will be
| important, but by the time we have the cargo capacity to build
| colonies on the moon it seems likely that someone would be very
| happy to trade, say, 100t of Earth-sourced C/N/H for 100t of
| Moon-mined Au, shipping included.
| slashdev wrote:
| I don't expect there to be much in the way of heavy elements
| on the moon. It's mostly made of lighter stuff that got
| blasted off in the collision with earth when the moon was
| formed.
| Retric wrote:
| The surface has been slowly bombarded long after the moons
| creation. So surface mining could have a very different
| elemental mix than subsurface mining.
|
| ~48.5 tons of material hits the earth's atmosphere per day.
| The moons smaller, but suck impacts where likely more
| common in the past * 4 billion years and you're talking a
| few feet of such material across the entire surface.
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-
| meteors/me...
| wongarsu wrote:
| Impact sites of larger asteroids are also great targets
| for mining operations. For example there's some
| speculation about the gigantic impact crater on the far
| side of the moon containing a gigantic metal lump below
| the surface
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole%E2%80%93Aitken_b
| asi...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nasa-moon-mass-crater-
| met...
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's not entirely clear to me why you'd want to find
| asteroids on the moon rather than finding them in space,
| where the mass wouldn't hardly have to be lifted.
| AlanSE wrote:
| The problem with asteroids is the population dynamics and
| time required with these heliocentric orbits. Yes, there
| are asteroids at a lower Delta-V than the surface of the
| moon. There might be only a handful that are even worth
| capturing and mining. If this scaled up, however, you
| would quickly deplete this population of NEOs.
|
| While the Delta-V might be less, it's not less by MUCH
| because you spend most of your fuel getting to Earth's
| escape velocity in the first place. The Delta-V benefit
| is also balanced against a massive time lag involved in
| sending a robotic spacecraft to capture and boost it to
| an orbit where we can better access and refine it. Or you
| send the refinery to the asteroid for larger asteroids.
| Problem there - you'll basically have to build a new
| refinery for each asteroid. Even for larger NEOs at
| higher Delta-Vs, the mass is not all that much. It's also
| not clear that microgravity will be any better than 1/6th
| gravity.
|
| There are very strong arguments for Lunar mining. We're
| talking about ~1 week for transit time from Earth to
| there. The moon can build vast Earth-like industry. You
| get to cherry-pick a wide variety of asteroid material
| types (except for volatiles) without building a new
| factory for each. Surface transportation isn't
| particularly hard. Materials to build solar panels are
| widely available.
|
| Asteroids will be useful at some point, but only after we
| can reach the frost line. Otherwise, the asteroids we get
| will be parched and not offer much beyond what's on the
| moon, or what we can lift from Earth. After we get to the
| frost line, we will get vast troves of organic material,
| but this is at tremendous Delta-V cost and outrageously
| remote and time consuming to access.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| On paper, it would be easier to lift them from the moon
| than it would be to intercept and slow them down enough
| to land them on earth. When the asteroid hits the moon it
| expends huge amounts of energy in the impact, slowing it
| to the a near-stop as compared to its speed while free in
| space.
|
| It may be possible to aerobrake asteroids at orbital
| velocities in earth's atmosphere, but that is a VERY
| dangerous proposition. It might work for small rocks, but
| a commercially-relevant chunk of iron would be a very
| dangerous object to point at earth.
| csomar wrote:
| But shipping from the moon to the earth should be much
| cheaper? I don't have the math (so someone please do?) but
| based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial
| to send stuff to earth.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Looking at our handy solar system delta-v map[1] it takes
| 2.5 km/s of delta-v to get from the Moon's surface to an
| Earth intercept course (you can aerobrake to a landing)
| and 14.6 to get up from the Earth surface to the Moon's
| (no aerobraking, you have to use rockets to land). Also
| without an atmosphere you can use railguns and such to
| take off on the Moon, if you get more than a few km/s of
| boost on the Earth that way you'll burn up.
|
| [1]https://i.imgur.com/WGOy3qT.png
| fastball wrote:
| Escaping the moon's gravity well is basically all you
| need to get stuff back to Earth.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The machine that does this first has to leave Earth and
| land softly on the moon before it can start boosting
| stuff back. You can't skip the first two steps.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> ... based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be
| trivial to send stuff to earth.
|
| You mean the worlds largest rocket? That machine that
| launched _from_ the moon first had to be brought _to_ the
| moon, a task requiring an enormous rocket and untold
| support structures on earth. Of course one might say
| "build the rocket on the moon from moon rocks" but that
| requires significant handwaving. Try smelting aerospace-
| quality metal in your garage before suggesting that
| anyone simply park an aluminum smelting facility in a
| lunar crater.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Which will of course tank the price of Au into the oblivion,
| since it is mostly speculative.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > "you're full of shit" will be a high form of praise, since
| shit will be thoroughly recycled and highly valuable.
|
| Extra special relativity.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > since your weight in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen will
| exceed many times your weight in gold
|
| Your weight is the same in any element, maybe you meant your
| worth?
| credit_guy wrote:
| Yes, good point.
| noobcoder wrote:
| It's incredible to think about the implications of these new
| findings on the moon's water content. Not only could it
| potentially aid in future space missions and colonization
| efforts, but it also raises questions about the moon's formation
| and history. The fact that the water in the glass beads is of
| solar wind origin adds another layer of complexity to the moon's
| story.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| One one hand, that's really cool. ON the other, leave the moon
| alone?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| by that logic our sun burns off a moon worth of mass in about a
| million years. thats the ultimate waste. I say convert it all
| into space habitats & dyson swarms.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Worried about disturbing the ecosystem?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| No.
|
| It's because there's clearly alien spaceships hiding behind
| the moon.
| yellowapple wrote:
| The lunar quesolith is a vital natural resource which must be
| preserved at all costs.
| Intermernet wrote:
| That damn Wallace, and his despicable hound are apparently
| trying to raid the quesolith. They Must Be Stopped!
| mongol wrote:
| It will become so ugly once exploitation starts. You know the
| pristine look of a field with new snow? To compare with once
| there are footsteps and tire tracks everywhere? The moon's
| beautiful undisturbed dust will become an ugly mess and look
| like garbage.
| rini17 wrote:
| It's not like pristine snow at all, but like dusty
| asphalt(it really does have such color) constantly churned
| by meteoric impacts. It's possible however, that we avoid
| using such a hostile environment to a bare minimum and stay
| and mine underground instead.
|
| I can see Mars landscape as beautiful and worth preserving,
| but drawing the line there.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The regolith is replete with embedded elements from the
| solar wind and micrometeorites etc. Most in situ resource
| extraction would be surface strip mining. But the
| percentage of the surface needed would be small. Both the
| moon and mars having no oceans have vast surface areas. A
| totally exploitive approach would only touch such an
| infinitesimal tiny portion of the area it's hard to
| imagine conservation is a top priority.
| rini17 wrote:
| Parent was concerned about spoiling pristine regolith by
| footprints and tracks.
|
| Anyway, multiply the mine areas several times, it's
| unlikely the raw regolith will be exported. Processing
| will need solar power plants and radiators to dump waste
| heat (can't dump it into atmosphere as we're used to).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| You could conduct the heat via heat pipes into the crust.
| The lunar basalt has decent thermal conductivity. Using
| something like mercury or alcohols (which have a low
| freezing point, and have ok phase change temperatures),
| or something more exotic you should be pretty ok.
| Radiators are mostly useful off a surface that can act
| like a heat sink, especially one as cold as the moon.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Oh I'd say you wouldn't process regolith for export at
| all, but for use on the moon. I think you wouldn't
| process and export raw materials on the moon I think you
| would do heavy industry you wouldn't do on earth in the
| cave systems of the moon and export manufacture goods. I
| don't think you would even export them to the earth but
| into orbit or interplanetary. Exported materials from the
| moon to mars would be a lot more economical than the
| earth.
| mongol wrote:
| It is like pristine snow in that it does not have traces
| of human activity all over it. But in contrast to snow,
| it changes very slowly, and no weather to smoothen out
| traces either.
| boc wrote:
| There's always Mars
| boc wrote:
| There's always Mars.
|
| Or Montana.
| gambiting wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating how large the moon is.
| Also moon is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every
| day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging
| museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| "I think you might be underestimating how large the Earth
| is. Also Earth is receiving thousands of meteorite
| impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some
| unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing
| planetary body."
| zhte415 wrote:
| The solifugus were getting out of hand last year, but the
| packs of tardigrades we released seem to have them under
| control.
| CSSer wrote:
| The moon is about 1/4th the size of the Earth, or about as
| wide as the United States. The moon also significantly
| impacts our tides here on Earth. Now, the optimist in me
| would say there's no way little old humanity could manage to
| find a way to screw that up. The pessimist in me notes that
| in roughly a hundred years we've managed to push our planet
| to the brink of ecological disaster, so to answer your
| question: yes, a little bit (but not the ecosystem you're
| referencing).
| danparsonson wrote:
| Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very
| determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but
| a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest:
|
| Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs
|
| Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per
| [1])
|
| One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years
|
| So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of
| it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of demand
| for moon iron as we have here on Earth - so we have some
| time to think about it at least.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ir
| on_or...
| DesiLurker wrote:
| meh.. automated mining to solar panel construction &
| using the metal+energy to make a mass driver in a fully
| closed loop system. Now you'll have a exponentially
| increasing mining and space habitat and/or dyson swarm
| construction platform. I'll bet we can shred the moon
| clean off in under a few 100k years.
| danparsonson wrote:
| By which time everyone here will be long dead, so I don't
| think there's any need to lose sleep over it...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| How long to do Earth?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Even a second-rate H.G. Wells adaptation could imagine
| humanity finding a way-
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odrgDzciG6s
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Humans have a way of supply creating demand. And tech
| will evolve. Tell the chatbot you want a USS Enterprise
| kind of thing and use your free startup credits to fund
| it. Might be possible within next say 10k years? Much
| less than a hundred billion.
| [deleted]
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What's the benefit to anyone, humans or non-humans, of leaving
| the moon alone?
| darthrupert wrote:
| Nestle Moon Water. Only $5.99 per millilitre.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What nobody talks about is that the average temperature of lunar
| soil is below the freezing point of water and never gets above
| the freezing point over day-night cycles.
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/19906/constant-lun...
|
| If you buried a chunk of ice under a few meters of soil it might
| sublimate but if there were appropriate geological trapping
| structures for the vapor, underground ice could be stable on the
| moon and could be produced by drilling into it.
|
| Such ice could not be detected by remote sensing the way people
| have detected signs of water on the moon so far.
|
| Now it's just speculation, you'd need some mechanism for the ice
| to get there, I'm not so sure if any ice would remain if a comet
| hit the moon and some of it got buried by a landslide. I think
| how the
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
|
| was made by an iron meteorite but very little of the material was
| left at the site.
| starbase wrote:
| The more we learn, the more hospitable the universe turns out to
| be.
| once_inc wrote:
| Hard disagree. Finding 'water' trapped in glass beads isn't
| something useful to us. Converting that to potable or even just
| liquid water will take far more energy than taking that water
| out of Earth's gravity well using conventional rockets.
|
| The universe is still a harsh, bleak, unforgiving,
| inhospitable, irradiated wasteland of empty nothingness. Humans
| need very specific temperatures, air pressures, atmospheric
| compositions to survive. Humans need food that also needs those
| things to survive. We can alter extra terrestrial objects to
| suit our needs, but that costs us energy, materials, and
| money/time. Right now, we are far too busy chasing fads and
| trinkets, and bashing in the skulls of our own fellows to be
| able to manage this.
| azernik wrote:
| I think you're underestimating how much energy is involved in
| pulling water out of the Earth well
| starbase wrote:
| Are you safer and more comfortable in the universe than your
| ancestors were 1000 years ago?
|
| How about 1,000,000 years ago?
|
| How about 1,000,000,000?
|
| Thought so.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| We have a little pocket of the universe. For a good chunk
| of it, have fun singing in the vacuum.
| gchaincl wrote:
| water does not always mean life then?
| pengaru wrote:
| frozen and bathed in UV is a problem for life AIUI
| c3534l wrote:
| If it did, then every comet would be full of life.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Recent discussion of at least part of this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391984
| whiteboardr wrote:
| So "infinity pools" up there would be in a completely different
| league?
| once_inc wrote:
| Considering the lack of an atmosphere, an infinity pool on the
| moon would be frozen during sundown, and sublimate away as soon
| as the sun reached it. Unless your 'completely different
| league' meant 'completely useless', then no.
| sgt wrote:
| #domelife
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I wonder if there are locations along the dark side / light side
| border, where some of this water boils off during the 'daytime'
| heat, and then freezes again during darkness, and is just sitting
| on the surface as a fine layer of frozen crystals? I know there
| in very little atmosphere, but maybe just enough to hold a little
| water vapor? Maybe over time this would allow more accumulation
| in permanently shaded parts of the lunar landscape, including of
| course the dark side.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| The current consensus is that any water deposited by a
| meteorite will be vaporized and lost unless it happens to end
| up in a "cold trap" permanently shadowed area. What you
| described is close to what happens when a meteorite with water
| hits the surface -water is dispersed and whatever water
| molecules randomly end up in a cold trap stay there.
|
| Evidence of water in sunlit areas as in the article is new and
| it's thought that it is trapped in glass, so I think it's a
| separate mechanism and water escaping from inside of glass,
| being evaporated and then also ending up in a cold trap must be
| very unlikely.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Reminder that the moon does not have a "dark side". This is a
| misnomer. The back of the moon gets the same amount of sunlight
| as the front. Unless you mean the side which is not presently
| illuminated. Water could freeze there but it would boil off
| again when the sun lights it up again.
|
| However there are craters at the poles that never experience
| sunlight, and water does accumulate in them. You don't need any
| atmosphere to hold water vapor - the water vapor itself is held
| in the moon's gravity well and floats around until it cools
| somewhere, such as these craters.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| >The back of the moon gets the same amount of sunlight as the
| front.
|
| silly me, yes even better then, since in theory there should
| always be some amount of water vapor floating around? I just
| recall a weather phenomenon in Finland when the atmospheric
| temperature drops sufficiently that even the water vapor
| freezes and falls like 'stardust'. So would a big sun shield
| on the moon create a similar temperature drop allowing
| capture the ice crystals? maybe the moons gravity is
| insufficient.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > The back of the moon gets the same amount of sunlight as
| the front.
|
| Actually, doesn't the back get more sunlight? The front of
| the moon is occasionally eclipsed by earth.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Why does the water vapor gravitate to the poles?
|
| Also, if there is X amount of water, and ever thaw / freeze
| cycle loses some amount Y, can't we estimate what X was Z
| years ago?
| johnwalkr wrote:
| It doesn't really gravitate to the poles, it's just that
| once water reaches a permanently shadowed bit of a crater,
| it stays there forever.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Reminder that the moon does not have a "dark side". This is
| a misnomer.
|
| It isn't. The side of the moon that cannot be seen from Earth
| is called the dark side of the moon. It's called that for the
| same reason that the Dark Ages are called dark: because we
| can't see them.
|
| It is true that the dark side of the moon gets just as much
| sunlight as the light side does.
| duggan wrote:
| Sounds like something a person living on the dark side of
| the Earth would say.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| AFAIK the "Dark Ages" are named like that because the
| Renaissance people thought they were enlightened, compared
| to the "barbaric people" who lived before them, not because
| we have less documents (although we do)
| housecarpenter wrote:
| Perhaps originally, but the reason it persists as a term
| even when used by people who don't think medieval people
| were relatively unenlightened is that it can also be
| construed as referring to the lack of documents. (And for
| those who do regard medieval people as relatively
| unelightened, they might regard the lack of documents as
| something intrinsically associated with that.)
| stametseater wrote:
| The context was thermal energy received from the sun, not
| attention received from man.
|
| Your clap-back might make sense when somebody is
| criticizing Pink Floyd, but it doesn't make sense here.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I work in aerospace (lunar exploration actually), and
| everyone involved goes out of their way to always use the
| term far side and explain to laypeople about it. Regardless
| of its origin, I've commented on it in conversation at
| least a dozen times and I don't think I've yet had the
| other person use the phrase and not also think there is a
| permanently dark side of the moon.
|
| Online there is often also some pedant who explains "well
| actually there is a dark side but it changes". Because your
| last sentence is about sunlight I actually interpreted
| "dark side of the moon" as the unlit/ lunar nighttime side
| on the first several reads.
|
| Anyway it can be interpreted at least three ways:
|
| - Referring incorrectly to the far side
|
| - Referring correctly to the far side because actually dark
| means something else (but it will be interpreted
| incorrectly anyway)
|
| - Referring to the side currently in lunar nighttime
|
| The terms "near side", "far side", "lunar night" and "lunar
| day" are much better.
| areoform wrote:
| Every such discovery reaffirms that the moon is a time machine.
|
| Next to (or inside) the ice from the Permanently Shadowed
| Regions, there may be clues to how life got started on Earth.
| https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-6546-7_...
| It's estimated that this trapped ice may be from the Earth and
| the Moon from 3.6B to 4.2B+ years ago. Along with other
| volatiles, this may give humanity an unprecedented look at what
| the Earth and the Moon were like _before_ life arose. And if we
| 're truly lucky, depending on how old life is, it may even help
| us understand how our planet changed _while_ life arose and
| _after_ life arose.
|
| If it's not there, then the glass beads that they found the water
| in could also contain trapped gases and compounds that we've
| become better at detecting. Gases were found in one of the beads
| brought back by Apollo 15,
| https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1991LPI....22..409...
|
| It will likely take decades to figure out most of the information
| those samples will contain. Helium 3 wasn't discovered in the
| Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 samples until the 1980s. The Apollo
| samples are still yielding new science all these decades later.
|
| I'm so excited about what the future has in store for us.
|
| If you'd like to learn more, this is a fairly approachable
| article written by NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr. Jim Green,
| https://room.eu.com/article/evolution-of-volatiles-on-the-mo...
|
| The Moon as a Recorder of Organic Evolution in the Early Solar
| System: A Lunar Regolith Analog Study --
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2014.1217
|
| Potential for prebiotic chemistry at the poles of the Moon --
| https://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.4...
| rikthevik wrote:
| > I'm so excited about what the future has in store for us.
|
| Me too. But sometimes I read too many snarky HN comments and I
| forget.
|
| We are very fortunate.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Reading ordinary news, does not help either.
| greggsy wrote:
| I've always wondered if this ice could have been the remnants
| of a comet, which after centuries of slowly spiralling closer
| and closer, landed gently on the moon in a soft cloud of dust.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| There's no fluid bodies on the moon to cushion an incoming
| asteroid or comet - even if there was an initial gentle
| capture by the moons gravity, the object would either orbit
| indefinitely, be cast off, or meet a violent end, scattering
| atomized material across the surface in a wide debris field.
| This is why theres so much lunar dust coating the entire
| surface of the moon, and why that surface is so tremendously
| scarred. The ice is likely the result of countless violent
| collisions like this, and the ice crystals that manage to
| land in shaded craters accumulate while those exposed to the
| sun quickly sublime away.
| mucle6 wrote:
| time capsule*
| 32gbsd wrote:
| Moonbase when?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| For what exactly?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Set up new places to fight over.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| "Space: the latest frontier."
| gnarbarian wrote:
| prison mining colony.
|
| but seriously, it could be used as a manufacturing and
| industrial hub for deep space operations like asteroid
| mining.
|
| think about it like this. if we can manufacture things on the
| moon we can launch things for almost nothing into both earth
| orbit and the outer solar system due to how the orbital
| mechanics work.
|
| this means we can build a million probes and send them all
| over the solar system, manufacture generation ships,
| permanent self sustaining space based habitats.
|
| a new era of expansion, exploration, and discovery.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Turtles all the way down.
|
| "Why do we need a space station?"
|
| "As practice for getting to the Moon!"
|
| "What can we do on the Moon?"
|
| "Build spaceships for getting to the asteroid belt!"
|
| "Why do we need to get to the asteroid belt?"
|
| "So we can make components for the Mars colonies!"
|
| "Why do we need a Mars colony?"
|
| ...
| SanderNL wrote:
| Why do we need to do _anything_?
|
| We are the grey goo of the universe. Expansion is our
| thing.
| once_inc wrote:
| So long as we don't come into contact with the black goo
| of the universe, I am more than happy doing what we do.
| nathancahill wrote:
| If you look at it that way, you can use the same logic
| here on Earth. Why do you go to work in the morning?
|
| I know how these question chains go, I have a young son.
| [deleted]
| voz_ wrote:
| Because Terrans are the greatest species ever. A single
| planet is literally all our eggs in one basket.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| more people is better than fewer people. it means more of
| humanity, more discoveries, artwork, music, philosophy.
|
| the more we spread out the more freedom we have to pursue
| our individual dreams and aspirations. (I believe
| individual freedom is inversely proportional to
| population density)
|
| the more we spread out the less likely we are to become
| extinct in a single catastrophic event.
|
| the instinct to explore discover and expand is
| intrinsically human. Implying humans should stay on earth
| is about as silly as thinking humans never should have
| left a small valley in Africa that could only support 100
| people.
|
| to stay is to die and become extinct. that might be
| preferable to some. and you are free to do so yourself,
| but please don't prevent those of us who have that
| unquenchable fire from pursuing that which will set our
| entire species free.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| You know, they used to say the same thing about big
| mountains, right?
|
| Here's a slightly older take on it from that era:
|
| """
|
| People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount
| Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no
| use.'
|
| There is not the slightest prospect of any gain
| whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour
| of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical
| men may turn our observation to some account for the
| purposes of aviation.
|
| But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring
| back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any
| coal or iron...
|
| If you cannot understand that there is something in man
| which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes
| out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life
| itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why
| we go.
|
| What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And
| joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat
| and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.
| That is what life means and what life is for.
|
| """
|
| (That's from George Mallory, for the curious.)
| gnarbarian wrote:
| you get it.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| So does William Shatner:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU2ftCitvyQ
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > """[...] What we get from this adventure is just sheer
| joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. [...]"""
| (That's from George Mallory, for the curious.)
|
| For many who are climbing the highest mountains that
| sheer joy turns into literal end if life. Wikipedia is
| trying to collect a list of them [0].
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_di
| ed_clim...
| brookst wrote:
| For many people, loss of life is not the overriding
| concern.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Which is fine. As much as it's a cliche to say "they died
| doing what they loved", most people die in absolutely
| horrible circumstances. Death is death. I've had a few
| friends die mountaineering, BASE jumping, climbing etc.
| and once I've grieved I actually admit that they did, in
| reality, die doing what they loved. I may miss them, and
| call them selfish for engaging in dangerous activities,
| but I respect and admire the drive to push limits that
| border on the impossible. There are many more deaths that
| are purely senseless, easily preventable and just as
| tragic. No one other than the friends and family of those
| people seems to care or comment on the circumstances of
| those deaths.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| There's adventure you fund yourself, and then there's
| adventure that taxpayers fund to the tune of several
| trillion dollars.
| Chathamization wrote:
| Yeah, if a huge chunk of DARPA's budget was spent sending
| people to climb mountains "Because it's there," people
| wouldn't be happy. The NASA budget for aeronautics is
| 1/8th the budget devoted to sending people into space
| "because it's there." Yet the aeronautics research is
| much more likely to have an actual positive impact on
| people's lives.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Because we are well over 75% through the window this
| planet can support life and are headed towards a complete
| extinction event with little chance of survival?
|
| Life has been here for ~4.2bn years, has another good
| 500-800m years left until our carbon cycles grind to a
| halt.
|
| "Why do we need a space station?"
|
| "To save all life on Earth"
|
| I've grown rather disenfranchised with most ecological
| movements (outside of the Whole Earth branch). Given what
| we've learned about our planet in the last few decades,
| and our current understanding of where this planet is
| heading, it's hard to interpret their arguments as
| anything other than advocating for letting all life on
| Earth die a slow death over the next 1Bn years.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Carbon cycle?
| anvandare wrote:
| Earth is a spaceship, unfortunately somehow a bunch of
| monkeys went rampant and now they're busy tearing up the
| life support system.
|
| If we can satisfy their (limitless and still growing)
| hunger for energy and resources by exploiting the rest of
| the solar system, the monkeys can be kept pacified. That
| could buy us time to figure out a more permanent, and
| balanced, solution.
|
| The great thing about the Moon/Mars/asteroid belt is that
| we can strip mine it. Can't ruin the ecosystem if there
| isn't one.
| [deleted]
| once_inc wrote:
| ... to survive a giant rock falling on Earth?
| mgolawala wrote:
| "Because our population exceeds the carrying capacity of
| the planet, and if it does not do so already, will likely
| do so in the future, and if it does not do so in the
| future, it is still a good idea to have a backup plan for
| our descendants in case we manage to wreck this planet
| some how. Having a plan B just makes sense doesn't it?
| Bet you the dinosaurs wished they had one"
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's doesn't, though. Per capita consumption varies. It's
| more that a minority of our population vastly over-
| consumes. That problem would exist on another planet too.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Problem is, many would like to live just as this tiny
| minority.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That can be changed far more easily than which planet we
| live on.
|
| Arguably most people are forced to under-consume, but
| they'd be happy far below the most conspicuous of over-
| consumption now happening.
| dgroshev wrote:
| That's a popular argument that falls apart when you look
| at the aggregate level of material wealth on this planet.
| Using GDP per capita as a passable proxy: current world
| GDP per capita is around $12k afaik, which is about where
| Mongolia and Indonesia are. Considering high level of
| inequality there (when you go there as a tourist, you're
| exposed to the wealthiest part of the society, and we're
| talking about the average), do you think people would be
| happy to freeze their consumption on that level? Or even
| lower, because most people talking about "over-
| consumption" also think that the current level of
| consumption is unsustainable?
|
| To make things worse, there are also embedded emissions.
| You can see it with China, coming out of poverty requires
| infrastructure expenditure, which means "wealth averaged
| out" would be even worse than the average would suggest,
| as you can't average sewers and highways, you have to
| build them anew.
|
| There is just not enough wealth on this planet as it
| currently is. When you're saying "they'll be happy far
| below the most conspicuous of over-consumption", it
| actually means "worse than an average citizen of
| Mongolia, forever", which doesn't sound as enticing, does
| it
| DesiLurker wrote:
| you dont need to go further than asteroid mining and some
| robotic assembly platform. planets/moons are one of the
| worst uses of mass. I believe we'll end up making giant
| habitats like O'Neil cylinders and expanding using them..
| pretty soon.
|
| if you combine AI with robotics and space exploration,
| there is not much point to doing all this manually.
| fsloth wrote:
| For expanding humanitys footprint to non-terrestrial areas.
| In a sustainable way. The only way to do that is learn bit by
| bit what works and what not. It's too complex problem to
| completely tackle by preplanning (unless we reach singularity
| first and we figure out it's actually possible to design
| robust life sustaining systems without prototyping).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Introverts
| yellowapple wrote:
| aeiou
| dafugg wrote:
| John Madden
| gnarbarian wrote:
| just in case people don't get the joke
| https://youtu.be/Hv6RbEOlqRo
| evandale wrote:
| I thought I've seen every 10+ year video on youtube already
| but you've proven me wrong. Thanks for this!
| yellowapple wrote:
| The in-game chat's support for music will never cease to
| amaze me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNPKXfb3rws
| sublinear wrote:
| erbrbrbrbr
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well SpaceX is very close to launching the big rocket, which if
| successful will totally change the economics of space
| exploration and settlement. Current launch date is no earlier
| than April 17th, which is quite soon!
| wincy wrote:
| I'm sure Elon really wants the big rocket to go on 4/20 if at
| all possible.
| hulitu wrote:
| When they find oil, or cobalt, or rare earths. We have enough
| water on earth, we don't need the one on the moon. /s
|
| You might remember, Columbus did not go to America for a
| vacation.
| ornitorrincos wrote:
| no, he went to india to wrestle the spice commerce from the
| portuguese, finding a different continent was not on his
| plans
| sclarisse wrote:
| With the ultimate goal of financing a new crusade, and
| retaking Jerusalem for Christendom. No, really.
|
| All the profits and the gold he was obsessed with? They
| weren't for him, they were for the crusade; meanwhile he
| was spending much of the time dressing like a monk.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| Frankly, I would rather go to the moon for a vacation than
| America. Space tourism would easily pay for a moon base.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| No, he went to get a promotion. He should have launched a
| chat app instead.
| maxcan wrote:
| Actually moon water can be quite valuable. Because it
| requires so much less energy to escape lunar gravity, if you
| have water, and if you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen,
| you can make a very effective gas station for rockets going
| to Mars and further and get a little respite from the tyranny
| of the rocket equation.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Slavery and bloodsport, but neither will be found on the moon
| so your point stands.
| yellowapple wrote:
| We'll just have to make our own, then.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You can also extract a lot of h2o from what goes down the
| porcelain
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| As soon as there is enough of a market interest in anything
| that can be obtained from Moon and can't really be faked on
| Earth!
|
| I have faith in capitalism, at least in this regard.
| jrussino wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/artemisnasa/comments/12jox39/timeli...
|
| Does the lunar gateway meet your definition of a "moonbase"?
| Because if you mean "long-term human presence at the moon" (at
| least, in the same sense in which we have "long-term human
| presence in orbit" with the ISS) then the answer seems to be
| "possibly as soon as the early 2030's.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Gateway
| cm2187 wrote:
| Even assuming the ice is pure water, wouldn't it be radioactive
| given that some molecule come from the sun and the moon is
| exposed to radiations with no protective atmosphere?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also we could do some approximations how much radiation does
| the atmosphere block? Even at factor of passing 1 to million or
| billion. We would still have huge amount of radioactive water
| in our seas and glaciers. But we don't.
| [deleted]
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Being exposed to radiation does not make something radioactive.
| Radioactive particles settling on the thing is what usually
| causes things to become radioactive.
|
| We actually use radioactivity to sterilize food.
| arethuza wrote:
| Neutron activation will make things radioactive?
| stametseater wrote:
| Correct, the lunar soil is itself radioactive because it's
| subjected to neutron radiation. What's more, the
| radioactivity of lunar soil _increases with depth_ ; the
| Apollo 17 Lunar Neutron Probe Experiment found that the
| radioactivity peaks at about 1 meter under the surface. I
| believe this is because the lunar soil moderates the
| incoming high energy neutrons (thermal neutrons are more
| likely to be absorbed.) This effect means that careful
| planning would be required when shielding a Moon colony. If
| you just haphazardly bulldoze lunar soil onto your habitat,
| you could easily make your problem worse.
| azernik wrote:
| Hydrogen from the sun is generally not deuterium, let alone
| tritium. Irradiation does not, as a rule, make the irradiated
| thing radioactive; the hydrogen nuclei aka protons are
| "radiation" because they're moving very fast and cause damage
| when they hit things, not because they're inherently different
| from other protons.
| usgroup wrote:
| "But there is water there. And two new studies--one Chinese, the
| other American--suggest that lunar soil may have a good deal more
| water in it than modern space scientists previously believed.
| It's still very, very dry; NASA'sArtemis program is looking for
| ice in shadowed craters near the moon's south pole, and mission
| managers should not change those plans."
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