The Big Question: What Might The Existence Of Water On The Moon Mean For Space Travel?

From The Independent:

Why are we asking this now?

The American space agency Nasa announced yesterday that three separate missions examining the Moon have found clear evidence of water there. The discovery has huge implications not only for science, but geopolitics as well.

Water, as on Earth? Water you could float a boat in?

No. We are not talking oceans here, or rivers, or lakes or even puddles. What researchers claim to have found are molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust in the top millimetres of the Moon's surface – in essence, water-bearing minerals, rather than water that is in any way free flowing. But water is water. And water is the essential element for life on earth.

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NASA/Ames-Controlled Moon Mission Will Add To New Discovery Of Water

From Mercury News:

A probe controlled from Ames Research Center that will hit the moon in two weeks may help unlock a major new scientific riddle, following NASA's stunning announcement Wednesday that the lunar surface is laced with water.

LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), a mission controlled from Moffett Field in Mountain View, is scheduled to smash into a crater near the moon's south pole in the early hours of Oct. 9. Scientists will analyze the resulting debris plume for signs of large amounts of ice that may have persisted for eons in the extreme cold of perpetually shadowed craters.

The LCROSS mission had been about human exploration, trying to answer the question of whether there is enough ice on the moon to aid human exploration. The components of water — hydrogen and oxygen — could be used for life support or rocket fuel, if and when NASA returns astronauts to the moon.

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Water Found On The Moon

How So Much Water? Some Ideas...
A stream of charged hydrogen ions carried from the sun by the solar wind. One possible scenario to explain the new finding of water on the lunar surface is that during the daytime, when the moon is exposed to the solar wind, hydrogen ions liberate oxygen from lunar minerals to form OH and H2O, which are then weakly held to the surface. At high temperatures (red-yellow) more molecules are released than adsorbed. University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McREL

From Discovery News:

Shattering a long-held belief that Earth's moon is a dead and dry world, a trio of spacecraft uncovered clear evidence of water and hydrogen-oxygen molecules throughout the lunar surface.

"There's no question that there is OH [hydroxyl, which is made up of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom] and H2O on the moon," University of Maryland senior research scientist Jessica Sunshine told Discovery News.

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India’s Lunar Mission Finds Evidence Of Water On The Moon

From The Independent:

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.

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Report: NASA To Confirm Presence Of Water On The Moon

From 3News:

According to reports, NASA is set to reveal evidence of water has been discovered on the moon.

Space news website SpaceRef.com says the topic of a press conference to be held on Thursday is a paper appearing in the next issue of Science magazine, which contains results from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

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Solar System's Coldest Spot May Be On Moon

The coldest spot in our solar system may be on the moon, astronomers claim.

From The Telegraph:

The coldest spot in our solar system may be on the moon, astronomers claim.

In course of producing the first ever temperature map of the moon, Nasa discovered that at its south pole temperatures are lower than on Pluto, despite being far nearer to the sun.

The moon is about 93 million miles from the sun, while Pluto orbits at an average of around 6 billion miles from the centre of the solar system

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Private Firms Preparing for Moon Flights

Testing, Testing .... Armadillo Aerospace's Super Mod rocket makes the first free-flight landing on a surface designed to mimic a lunar surface. Armadillo Aerospace

From Discovery Magazine:

Sept. 21, 2009 -- Lured by millions of dollars in prize money, teams of private firms aren't waiting for NASA to figure out if, when and how to get back to the moon. They're preparing to go themselves.

The first $1 million prize for demonstrating a lunar landing system is due to be awarded at the end of October. The front-runner is Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which this month made back-to-back flights of a vehicle named Scorpius.

Two other contenders plan to enter the NASA-backed competition before this year's cutoff on Oct. 31.

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Lunar Orbiter Begins Long-Awaited Mapping Mission

In a surprise, high-resolution data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, right, shows indications of hydrogen both inside and outside of permanently shadowed craters. (Credit: NASA)

From CNET:

After two months of checkout and calibration, NASA's $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high mapping orbit Tuesday, and scientists said Thursday the spacecraft's instruments are delivering intriguing clues about the possible presence of water ice.

"The moon is starting to reveal her secrets, but some of those secrets are tantalizingly complex," said Michael Wargo, NASA's chief lunar scientist.

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Apollo Moon Rocks Lost In Space? No, Lost On Earth

This photo from the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, Netherlands shows authentic Dutch moon rocks on display. The detection of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' Rijksmueum should serve as a wake-up call for more than 130 countries who received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later. Experts say the whereabouts are unknown of hundreds of tiny rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts and given by the Nixon administration to friendly nations. Photo from AP

From USA Today:

AMSTERDAM — Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?

The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.

Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.

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Dreams Of A Lunar Observatory

From Technology Review:

If you could build an observatory on the Moon, what would you look for?

Imagine you could build an observatory on the Moon. What would you look for?

That was essentially the brief given to the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research, or LUNAR consortium, when NASA asked it to speculate about the unique astrophysics that could be done on the Moon.

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Why NASA Should Bomb the Moon to Find Water: Analysis

From Popular Mechanics:

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is now traveling to the moon at 5592 mph and will crash-land on Oct. 9 in order to gather data from the 6-mile-high impact cloud it will create. Today, as NASA announced the crater where LCROSS will land (Cabeus-A), the mission continues to drum up controversy. Is crash-landing on the moon really necessary for science? Will it be worth the damage done to the moon? To both these questions, PM answers a resounding, Yes. Here's why we're rooting for NASA's October mission to bombard the moon.

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NASA Names Target For Water Hunt At Moon's South Pole

Scientists have suggested that water ice millions of years old might be found in the shadowed craters of the moon's north and south poles, where the sun never shines. (AP)

From L.A. Times:

The LCROSS satellite and rocket are to plunge into the surface Oct. 9, stirring up a dust cloud that may contain ice. The find would have major scientific implications and aid future space plans.

NASA scientists announced Friday that they had picked a 60-mile-wide crater near the moon's south pole as the place where they will send a rocket to punch a hole in the lunar surface next month in search of water.

Instruments aboard other satellites and on Earth have detected a significant amount of hydrogen, a telltale marker for water, on the northwest rim of the crater known as Cabeus A.

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Money Woes Likely To Hobble NASA's Planned Moon Mission

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — NASA, whose successes helped cement America's reputation as the world's technological leader, is facing a series of money woes that could thwart its hopes of remaining the globe's leader in space exploration.

A blue-ribbon presidential panel is expected to advise the White House later this month that returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, as former President George W. Bush proposed, is financially impossible under NASA's $18.7 billion budget.

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Moonquake Mystery Deepens

From Earth Magazine:

Between 1969 and 1972, five Apollo missions installed seismic stations at their landing sites on the nearside of the moon. Because the moon was thought to be seismically dead, the instruments were left almost as an afterthought to detect meteor strikes. But from the time the stations were switched on until they were decommissioned in 1977, they recorded hundreds of internally generated moonquakes, some as strong as magnitude 5.5 on the Richter scale.

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NASA Successfully Tests Nuclear Reactor to Power Future Moon Bases

Gone Fission : See it bigger. John MacNeil

From Popular Science:

For a while now, NASA has been planning to use a nuclear fission reactor to power future bases on the Moon and Mars. They have now finally begun testing a Stirling engine-based system, subjecting it to simulated extraterrestrial conditions to examine how it would fare as a lunar power generator.

The fission reactor uses a sodium-potassium liquid metal mixture to transfer heat to a Stirling engine, which then uses gas pressure for electricity conversion. Testing has been successful so far, as researchers have been able to generate a constant 2.3 kilowatts of power from the engine, using a non-nuclear heat source. With the full nuclear reactor running, their goal is to produce 40 kilowatts of power.

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NASA's Moon Plan Too Ambitious, Obama Panel Says

From The Miami Herald:

A panel reviewing NASA's current plans for human space flight will report that there is no realistic way to return to the moon by 2020 -- or even 2028.

WASHINGTON -- NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it might be the wrong place to go, anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human space flight program.

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Radio Telescopes Turn The Moon Into World's Largest Neutrino Detector

Neutrino Detector? courtesy of NASA

From Popular Science:

Neutrinos, the infinitesimally small particles so faint physicists used to call them "the ghost particle," have driven scientists to construct immense underground facilities simply to catch a glimpse of a single one. Now, with even the most massive detectors failing to trap certain high-energy neutrinos, astronomers have turned to a larger filter: the Moon.

Teams of scientists on the supercomputer-linked LOFAR radio telescope in Holland, and on the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in the U.S. have both turned their attention to the Moon in hopes of recording rare neutrino interactions.

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Apollo 11 Experiment Still Going After 40 Years

Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago today, but they left behind more than footprints. An experiment they placed on the moon's surface is still running to this day.

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission. The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

"Yes, we are still going," said James Williams, a JPL scientist involved with the experiment, in an e-mail interview.

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What NASA's Return To The Moon May Look Like

To explore the lunar surface, NASA envisions a pressurised rover that will act as a mobile habitat, allowing astronauts to explore the lunar surface for weeks at a time without returning to their base. If supply depots are scattered along the way, these rovers could potentially have a range of hundreds of kilometres. (Image: Regan Geeseman)

From New Scientist:

The Apollo era may have ended as funding fizzled, and the programme's astronauts may be bigger fans of Mars, but the hope of returning to the moon never really went away.

Twenty years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, then-President George H. W. Bush proposed that the US build a base on the moon and send an expedition to Mars. The call fell flat with Congress, which never provided the funding to back up the plan.

But a decade and a half later, his son, President George W. Bush, articulated a similar vision with a clear deadline – an aim to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping-stone on the way to Mars.

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For Scientists, Moon Rocks Tell Story Of A Young Earth

From Philadelphia Inquirer:

For 40 years, the rocks hauled back from the moon have been changing the history of the Earth as we knew it.

The lunar rocks suggest that a smaller planet slammed into ours 4.5 billion years ago, creating the moon and enlarging the Earth. They tell the tale of a storm of space debris violently pounding both the Earth and moon, perhaps triggered by a dramatic reshuffling of the entire solar system.

Scientists today are still studying those rocks, hoping to decipher whether life had already emerged before the near-apocalyptic pummeling 3.9 billion years ago - and, incredibly, survived.

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