Wet. Dry. Wet. Dry. You’d think the moon were a vacuum cleaner infomercial.

A series of studies in the last few years has raised our hopes that the moon is not completely dry—researchers have said that it’s still drier than the driest places on Earth, but some small amount of water ice is there. Then, this afternoon, along comes another study to reassert that the interior of the moon is drier than bone-dry.

For his paper in Science, Zachary Sharp peered into the lunar samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions. Where previous studies of those Apollo rocks suggested water ice was locked inside the minerals, Sharp’s assessment focuses on the chlorine in the sample because it could tell him about the moon’s history.

Most scientists think the moon was born when a huge object roaming the inner solar system — something about the size of Mars — smashed into the embryonic Earth. Debris from the collision coalesced to form the moon. As it cooled, an ocean of magma covering its surface began to crystallize. Sharp and his colleagues studied what happened to two isotopes of the element chlorine during that process [Science News].

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I know, I know—after the flawless execution of the perfect crime, all you want to do is put your feet up at a bar with a patio and savor a cold one. However, a new study out in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry says that the bottle of Budweiser is just filling your body with incriminating evidence.

It’s no secret that traces of what you consume can end up in your hair (hence hair-based drug tests). The researchers wanted to know if they could find a signature in those traces that would show not just what you’ve been using, but also where it came from. So they traveled to a bunch of different U.S. cities and tested out a few of America’s favorite beverage products—Budweiser, Coke, and bottled water—to see if their chemical fingerprints matched up with the fingerprint of the local water supply.

Researchers found that water samples from 33 cities across the United States could be reliably traced back to their origin based on their isotope ratios. And because the human body breaks down water’s constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to construct the proteins that make hair cells, those cells can preserve the record of a person’s travels [ScienceNOW].

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Water, water (or ice) everywhere—that’s the refrain this year. This week we covered the study declaring that the moon was home to perhaps 100 times more water than previously thought, and it was just two months ago that sky-watchers spotted the first frosty asteroid out in the Asteroid Belt. Now, in a study in Nature, a team of astronomers says they’ve found another icy surprise in our solar system: a bright shiny object way out in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is that mess of objects orbiting the sun out beyond Neptune, but not as far as the Oort Cloud (once-proud Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object). There are plenty of icy bodies out there, including Pluto. But what doesn’t make sense about this one, KBO 55636, is how it stayed so pristine after a billion years of floating alone. MIT’s James Elliot, who led the study, says the object’s albedo, or reflectivity, is striking:

“That turned out to be very high, almost 90 percent… That’s consistent with it having a very highly reflective surface like water ice.” The finding was surprising because such old, distant bodies tend to have weathered, dull surfaces. “Objects orbiting that far out in space get generally darkened by accumulating dust… We don’t have an explanation for how it could stay so pristine” [Space.com].

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1969: “We landed on the moon. It’s dry.”

2008: “Excellent, we were wrong: It’s not totally dry.”

2010: “Actually, we may have been very wrong about that: There could be even hundreds of times more water there than we thought.”

That last statement is the latest in a rising tide of announcements of water on the moon; DISCOVER covered when the news broke in March, and now the study is out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To sum up: After reanalyzing moon samples from the Apollo landings and meteorites of lunar origin, a team led by Francis McCubbin calculated a water content of 64 parts per billion to 5 parts per million. That’s paltry compared to even the driest places on Earth. But, they write, “This lower limit range of water contents is at least two orders of magnitude [100X] greater than the previously reported value for the bulk Moon, and the actual source region water contents could be significantly higher.”

As exciting as that is, it raises the question: How did we miss this for 41 years?

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Two scientists went looking for water on Mars. After closely studying the Martian terrain, they think they might have found it–covering about a third of the planet, 3.5 billion years ago.

In a study published yesterday in Nature Geoscience, Gaetano Di Achille and Brian M. Hynek detail their hunt, which included looking at data from NASA’s Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), a probe that studied the topography of the planet’s surface for four and a half years, starting in the late 1990s.

Scientists have debated whether Mars once supported oceans for over two decades, and, as the authors claim in their study’s abstract, these oceans remain one of the “largest uncertainties in Mars research.”

The authors of this study, who started out speculating on how water might have formed the apparent deltas and valleys on the planet, eventually looked at the altitudes of these features to determine if they could have been linked to a large body of water.

Gaetano Di Achille and Brian Hynek … had been building a database of Martian river deltas and valleys to examine how they might have been eroded by water, but ultimately realized that they had enough data to tackle the bigger picture. “Our research started as kind of a joke,” says Di Achille. “We were working on this database of deltas and valleys, and we said: why don’t we try to check this ocean hypothesis?” [Nature News]

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The rainmakers of the 21st century may be armed with powerful lasers. New research suggests that zapping clouds with laser beams could trigger the formation of condensation droplets that would fall to the ground as rain. But while the study, published in Nature Photonics, raises the tantalizing hope of bringing on-demand rain to parched regions, some experts argue the technique is unlikely to ever be practical.

For more than 50 years, efforts to try to artificially induce rain have concentrated on ‘cloud seeding’ — scattering small particles of silver iodide into the air to act as ‘condensation nuclei’, or centres around which rain droplets can grow. “The problem is, it’s still not clear that cloud seeding works efficiently,” says optical physicist Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. “There are also worries about how safe adding silver iodide particles into the air is for the environment” [Nature News].

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There are millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but yesterday attention focused on just one. According to a couple of studies in Nature, a large asteroid called 24 Themis is rife with water ice and organic molecules, and the researchers say that it could be more evidence that the water so precious to life on Earth came to our planet on board such rocks.

Two research teams took infrared images of 24 Themis, which is about 120 miles in diameter and was discovered in 1853. This asteroid has an extensive but thin frosty coating. It is likely replenished by an extensive reservoir of frozen water deep inside rock once thought to be dry and desolate [AP].

The team, led by Humberto Campins, says finding so much ice on the surface was a surprise; at the asteroid’s distance from the sun—3.2 astronomical units (AU), or just more than three times further than the Earth—exposed ice has a “relatively short lifetime,” the scientists write. As a result, the idea of a below-surface reservoir seems likely. (Icy comets aren’t nearly so close to the sun on average; Halley’s comet can come within .6 AU of the sun, but then retreats to a farthest distance of more than 35 AU.)

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There are few more dramatic examples of humanity’s careless treatment of the earth than the Aral Sea.

The Aral’s precipitous decline began in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union began using river water to irrigate the mega-farms it established on the arid steppe. As the river water flowing into the sea slowed to a trickle, the Aral began drying up.

Once a colossal geographic feature—at 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers), it was the fourth largest inland water body on earth in terms of surface area—the Aral shrank to hold just one-tenth of its original volume, becoming a tragic shadow of itself [National Geographic]. Fisheries collapsed, people moved away, towns were abandoned, and the Aral became famous primarily for its ghostly landscapes, with rusting ships lying on sand dunes.

But now scientists report that the northern sector of the Aral is making a recovery, due to a concerted effort from the Kazakh government, the World Bank, and scientists. A dam completed in 2005 raised water levels and decreased salinity, and increased the North Aral’s span by 20 percent. Soon native plants, stifled for years by the saltwater, began to sprout, and migrating birds like pelicans, flamingos, and ducks again began to visit the Aral.  Nowadays, “It’s a paradise for birds,” says Russian Academy of Sciences zoologist Nick Aladin, who has been studying the Aral since the 1970s. “It’s a place for pleasure, and it’s an enormous victory” [National Geographic]. Freshwater fish have also returned, leading to hopes of a resuscitated fishing industry. And while the South Aral remains in dire straits, researchers say the tentative revival of the North Aral gives them hope.

Another sea, another headache. Over in the Middle East, several countries are weighing a proposal that could give new life to the dwindling Dead Sea–but that may cause environmental problems of its own.

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In the hot desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, finding fresh drinking water has always been a great challenge. For decades now, the state has been providing clean water by converting millions of gallons of seawater via desalination plants that remove salts and minerals from the water. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine [Technology Review].

Working on a joint project with IBM, Saudi Arabia’s national research group King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has announced that it will open the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant by 2012 in the city of Al-Khafji. The pilot plant will not just supply 30,000 cubic meters of clean water per day to 100,000 people, but will also reduce operating costs in the long run by harvesting energy from sunshine. Saudi Arabia, the top desalinated water producer in the world, uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its plants, according to Arab News [Technology Review].

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So far in 2010 we’ve seen nanotubes that carry thermopower waves to create electricity, nanoparticles that latch onto only damaged cells to deliver drugs there, and more. Today there are a couple more clever uses for nanotechnology—taking the salt out of salt water, and nanobots that deliver gene therapy.

In Nature Nanotechnology, an MIT team showed they could use nanotech to desalinate water in a new way. At the moment, desalination plants employ reverse osmosis, in which pressure forces the salt ions through a membrane. But this process is an energy-gobbler and the membrane is prone to clogging, which means that de-sal plants are inevitably big, expensive, fixed pieces of kit [Sydney Morning Herald].

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Over the last year, scientists have discovered that the moon isn’t a bone-dry place, as we previously imagined. Water ice has been spotted not just at the lunar south pole but also the north pole, and scientists have noted that the north pole deposits contain enough water ice to sustain a human lunar base. Now, scientists studying hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have found that samples containing the mineral apatite have minute traces of water.

The new analyses of the samples, revealed last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, show that the evidence of the moon’s water was right under scientists’ noses for almost 40 years–they just didn’t have sensitive enough instruments to detect it. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid [National Geographic].

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Water, water, everywhere! Radar results from a lunar probe have revealed that the moon’s north pole could be holding millions of tons of water in the form of thick ice, raising the possibility that human life could be sustained on Earth’s silvery satellite, NASA scientists said.

A NASA radar aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter found 40 craters, ranging in size from 1 to 9 miles across, with pockets of ice. Scientists estimate at least 600 million tons of ice could be entombed in these craters [Wired].

Scientists estimate that this amount of water could easily sustain a moon base, or, if the oxygen in the ice was converted to fuel, could fire one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years. Last year, scientists found almost 26 gallons of water ice on the moon’s south pole, by crashing a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. The crash produced a plume of material that provided evidence of water ice on the moon’s surface.

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Water, water everywhere. Another pass of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, made by the Cassini spacecraft last November, shows at least 30 geysers blasting water from the moon’s south pole. That’s 20 more than were previously known at that location. In addition, the most detailed infrared map of one of the south pole’s fissures, where jets emanate, indicates that the surface temperature there might be as high as 200 kelvins (-73º Celsius), or about 20 kelvins warmer than previously estimated [Discovery News]. Cassini drew to within about 1,000 miles of Enceladus to measure this geological feature, which is a fracture–one of the moon’s so-called “tiger stripes”–about a quarter-mile deep officially called Baghdad Sulcus.

While 200 kelvins is still a frigid temperature for we humans, research team member John Spencer said it could make a big difference on Enceladus. “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” Spencer said. ”Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we’ve found in the solar system” [Wired.com].

For more info (and some spectacular photos), check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy. And see 80beats’ previous coverage of Enceladus below:

Bad Astronomy: Enceladus Is Erupting!
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
80beats: New Evidence of Hospitable Conditions for Life on Saturn’s Moons
80beats: Geysers From Saturn’s Moon May Indicate Liquid Lakes, and a Chance for Life
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.

While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.

In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.

Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.

Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.

All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Five years ago, the Cassini spacecraft first detected plumes of water ice emanating from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, making the moon one of the best hopes for finding life somewhere else in the solar system. Astronomers have argued over whether or not those jets come from a subsurface ocean of liquid water, but new findings by Cassini provide evidence that water could indeed be sloshing around beneath the frozen surface of this small moon.

During a 2008 pass through the plumes, the spacecraft found negatively charged water molecules. Back home this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves [Scientific American]. Researcher Andrew Coates led the study, which is coming out in the journal Icarus.

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