scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here. The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.
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I'm being followed by a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
leaping and hopping on a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
...
Oh goody. We have record deficits, a HELLthcare bill that's about to double the already record deficits, people being unemployed up the wazoo, businesses going bankrupt, the economy going to shit, but never fear moon water is here to save the day.
The space program may be important in some aspects but we seriously need to cut this crappy spending out. Who cares if there is water on the moon. Are we saving it for when we run out here on earth? Are we going to harvest it and make colloidal moon water silver out of it? What's the point?
If I were president I would seriously consider cuting the budget by 50 % permanently starting with the space program and ending with special interst groups like Planned Parenthood. I could cut out the unnecessary programs and save us money. This water on the moon and mars business is crap and it is a serious waste of money that we desperately needd to put into jobs (not fake green jobs either) and growing the economy.
Of course this all could be a fake. We could be secretly bombing the alien/nazi moon base before the Japanese or Russians discover it and make contact. In that case, I support bombing the moon and diminising the water supply, but when a 3 foot tall hybrid alien with a small moustache comes down here and kicks our butts, don't blame me. I wasn;t the one who had to be nosy.
It's interesting news and possibly has some long-range implications.
I wouldn't expect any serious effort to extract water in a practical sense for some time to come. It would take years of research and money just to get to that level, and in the mean time the space program is in need of a system to get massive payloads into orbit cheaply, just as it essentially has a system to get delicate payloads (Humans) up into orbit using the recently developed space taxi idea from a number of civilian companies vying for future contracts.
I'm not opposed to using the state of the art liquid and solid fuel rockets we currently employ but they are realistically reaching the end of their designed capacity which wasn't actually for the space program but for 'defense'applications during the cold war.
I hope the shake-up at NASA brings a few good ideas for alternate approaches to launching such as the Truax design from the early 60s for a massive sea launch rocket made far more robust and re-usable. Not something you could hide in a silo in North Dakota.
I'd love to see NASA spending its funding to support the kind of research for which it so richly deserves all the credit in the world, while also directing some real bucks going towards incentives and prizes for design/manufacturers who could come up with working demonstrations that are scale-able and would likewise support the science research program for exploration and observational capacities.
It is a wonderful thing that Red State Rebel is not president.
Before I started working on nitric oxide, I worked on electrostatic separation (still do). I invented and commercialized an electrostatic separator that can separate ice from lunar soil, and have demonstrated separating ice from a ground basalt that simulates lunar soil. This was done in pilot equipment at â100C about 20 years ago. Since then we have commercialized the process and now have about 20 machines in operation at ~40 tons per hour at ~ 1 kwhr per ton processed. The mass of the power source to run it on the moon would be greater than the mass of my equipment.
Ice from basalt is a very easy electrostatic separation to do with the right separator. My separator is the right separator. Concentrating the ice before melting or vaporizing it will reduce the weight of the equipment needed to recover it by at least one and more likely two or more orders of magnitude (it takes ~2500 kwhr/ton to heat lunar soil hot enough to vaporize the water out).
The problems that NASA has are not technical, they are political and people problems. The driving force behind NASA is to get funding to big aerospace companies, not to actually accomplish anything.