Comments on: No lunar ice

By: jess tauber

jess tauber — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:37:58 +0000

So piffle- we truck in ice from elsewhere in the system (keep miners happy) and dump it in the dark craters. No biggie….

Jess Tauber

By: omninaif

omninaif — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:24:46 +0000

Ah ha! Gotcha bud! Thanks. Cause I sure as hell hate rocks with my Tang.

By: mike

mike — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 04:36:15 +0000

they didn’t mistake rocks for ice omni, what they had said previously was that ice could exist, albeit in small amounts in those asteroid impacts. [think of it as a bunch of dirt with a little ice in it, not mistaking rock for ice] the neutrons say this place has hydrogen, not neccessarily water- just atoms of hydrogen in some sort of form. water was a good guess as hydrogen could reduce oxides in the regolith or water from the impact its self. although this new development is as Ed Minchau put it so: “the Cornell study merely proved that high circular polarization ratios are not necessarily an indicator of water ice, but that the hydrogen so detected can be in other forms” there is also the fact that the crater “B” is only partially shaded- all this actually means is that theres no water in that particular crater where that particular probe crashed. there’s about 50 million kilometers^2 left to go- [although only a small amount of that is worth looking for water] hope isn’t lost yet. we could just shuttle hydrogen to the moon, its a lot cheaper than hauling big giganic tanks of water- just use it to reduce the carbon dioxide made from reducing Iron oxides with carbon monoxide that we use to mine and voila! water and some nice Iron with it to build a spiffy base.
CO2+H2+heatCO+H2O, 3CO+Fe2O3=>2Fe+3CO2 or 4CO+Fe3O4=>3Fe+4CO2

By: omninaif

omninaif — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:29:15 +0000

I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but how could one mistake rocks for ice?

By: tacitus

tacitus — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:07:22 +0000

So this is too bad. Dreams of a lunar base at the south pole may have just evaporated along with the purported ice.

Actually there’s still the prospect of building a lunar base at one of the poles — for the almost constant solar energy it would be able to tap into, not to mention being an ideal site for a moon-based observatory.

By: Dave Kary

Dave Kary — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:59:35 +0000

I wonder what this implies for Mercury. Similar radar data was what let to the original announcement of possible water ice at it’s pole (even before the lunar data, if I remember correctly). So, are we going to lose the Mercurian icecaps too?

By: The Bad Astronomer

The Bad Astronomer — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:33:46 +0000

OK, this is getting interesting. I may have been too hasty– but I haven’t read the paper, and cannot access it online. We get Nature here at work, so I’ll see what the article says and post a follow-up when I can.