Liquid Water Found on the Moon?

This set of images was brought to my attention by ziggystar60

I am going to show the two images ( well a clip of them) in a simple exact size cropping from the original NASA images... As we go on we can 'enhance' them for better detail and I call on ArMaP to help me adjust the color to a more true lifelike representation

Now before I continue I am going to tell you all "THis is Just a Rock" so we can get that out of the way right now...

But it's what's ON this rock , well actually under the rock, that is interesting. According to the NASA caption...

122:59:55 While Jim started raking, Dave went over to the boulder to get his tongs and take a close-up of the bottom of the boulder. Notice that he is using the tongs to make sure that he is at the proper distance for good focus.

Here is the clip Water 'Droplets' Under the Rock AS15-86-11570 Closeup



This is a crop from image AS15-86-11570

Here is the same area in the second image taken as a stereo pair for 11570



This is a crop from image AS15-86-11571

Here is the image section with labels to highlight the key points...



You can clearly see the reflection of the sun in the 'water droplets' Some of them are cloudy, some are clear...

Also in one crevice there is another unusual occurrance...

These two photos were taken seconds apart, but there is a drastic change in the crevice...

This is from 11570



This is from 11571



Perhaps someone can put these two together in a short animation?

Comments?

[edit on 6-5-2008 by zorgon]

That was a good find, congratulations to ziggystar60.

Whatever that is, it does not look transparent or even translucent to me, it looks opaque, but it sure looks like liquid, or something that was liquid at some point and that for some reason retained that shape.

As you asked for an animation, here it is.

As this is a GIF animation, the colours had to be reduced to 256 (a limitation of the GIF format), that is the reason for the duller look.

It looks that the reason for the difference is the different position, it's difficult to say if there was any other change.

I will try to see what I can make of those images.

Huh...curious. Though given what we know about conditions on the moon, this begs the question, how? An upwelling that a camera just happened to be in right position to take photos of? Did they turn over that rock and there was ice, and it melted?

It surely does look like water though, doesn't it?

This is going to be interesting...

It would help if multiple photos shows the things to get pushed out of shape from one to another to indicate these weren't solidified glass, which is sometimes produced as a result of meteorite impact.

Meteorite glass.

These images are difficult to explain for me
I wonder what fused mineral may create this effect, i frankly have no clue
It looks actually liquid to me, but i coud be wrong
LOL ArMaP beaten me to it
Animation removed

[edit on 6/5/2008 by internos]

That would be glass actually. Which formed when that rock slammed into the Moon I assume.

ALSJ

122:54:35 Scott: (To himself) Okay; and roll it over. (Pause)

[Dave comes around to the northwest face of the boulder, hops down into the crater the boulder made when it landed, puts his right hand on the top, preparing to push it over, and then stops to examine the rock more closely.]

122:54:40 Scott: Oh; what's that in there? Oh, me. It looks like a breccia. It sure is. The top layer is a breccia. You can see it. (Pause)

[With the TV cable now loose, Fendell pans counter-clockwise and, consequently, we don't get to see Dave push the boulder over. The photographs he takes later indicate that it rolled on to what was the west face.]

[Scott - "When Fendell gave it a command earlier, it didn't move. Maybe it's now picking up that command and he doesn't want it to move."]

[Jones - "Or, he wants to finish the pan that he started and couldn't finish because the cable got hung up."]

[Scott - "As typical, everybody watching this would have a different idea of what to do with the TV camera. And poor Fendell, fortunately he's got a filter between him and all the people with the great ideas. But can't you imagine poor Ed sitting there in the Control Room and everybody in the viewing room having their own idea of where to point that camera? (Chuckling) We all want to put our fingers in the pie, right? That had to be funny, and frustrating"]

[We then watched a little more.]

[Scott - "See! You just said, 'Oh, Ed!' You want it pointed at us pushing the boulder over. I'd never thought about this before, but I can just see everybody down at the Control Center wanting to drive that camera."]

122:55:03 Scott: There, that baby's over! (Pause)

[Fendell finally reverses direction to go back to the boulder.]

122:55:08 Scott: (Probably having knocked his tongs over) Lose my tongs.

122:55:11 Irwin: Do you want me to bring the other tongs?

122:55:13 Scott: No, I can get them.

[Dave hops into position to try to get down to get the tongs, which are lying flat on the ground. Fendell zooms in on the boulder and we lose sight of Dave.]

122:55:19 Irwin: (Laughing) Let me get them with the scoop.

122:55:23 Scott: Yeah. (Pause) A couple of pictures, and we'll get some of that material (that was) underneath the rock. (Pause)

[Dave moves the gnomon and, after he places it on the soil which had been covered by the boulder, we can see it swinging dramatically from side to side.]

[Scott, from a 1996 letter - "I must have been in a big hurry!"]

[Jim crosses the field-of-view as he goes off to the right to retrieve Dave's dropped tongs.]

122:55:50 Scott: Oh, there's a great big glass bubble on that rock!

[Dave takes a stereopair, AS15-86- 11561 and 11562, stepping to his left between frames.]

Emphasis mine.

[edit on 6-5-2008 by jra]

If that's not water, my name is Mud. Oh... wait.. To have mud, we MUST have water.

Nevermind.

The only lingering question for me is what's in that "mud" there? What kinds of minerals are in there? And is it possible that life could sustain itself in such a solution?

TheBorg

[Edited for addition of questions.]

[edit on 6-5-2008 by TheBorg]

Hate to point out that liquid water on the would only exist for the tiniest fraction of a second...

Or is this another John Learesq 'the moon has an atmosphere' thread?

reply to post by Now_Then


Regardless, the fact still remains that this appears to be water on the underside of a lunar rock sample. Is there a simpler explanation for how that could have gotten there?

TheBorg

I think most of us realize that it's probably not water, given conditions on the moon. It certainly did, and does, look kinda like water though. C'mon admit it...cool, clear water...mmmmm...water...

Upon reflection, it probably is meteoric glass of some sort. I wonder if they brought any back?

looks like permafrost to me.

I don't have much to add yet. give me a day or two to look into this, too. in the meantime, this post will put the thread on myATS.

Originally posted by seagull Did they turn over that rock and there was ice, and it melted?

Well NASA says its the bottom of the rock so they turned it over... Now can anyone tell me what the surface rock temperature would be? I mean that sun is pretty hot during the Lunar day... but is there any data that measures ground temp like they did on Mars?

If the rock was heated, maybe some melting beneath it?

Q: Does that mean there is ice?

A: There's something that is reflecting radar signals like ice.

Q: The geologist said it was ice.

A: Highly likely that it's ice. There may be other stuff mixed in with it. Carbon dioxide and things like that.

Q: What other things would give the polarization effect that you're reading now as possible water?

A: We looked at the possibility that it could be a funny arrangement of rocks and other things, but again, it really was so highly correlated with that angle and so highly localized with the South Pole, that the most likely explanation is something that is low loss, and ice is the most likely thing.

Q: Can you go over the one to ten percent again? I don't understand the difference between that and what's in the bottom of the crater and where the one to ten percent...

A: What we could measure, as far as the abundance of it, is we have the radar footprint in a certain area. What we can show is basically the amount of signature we get back, assuming that the ice on the moon reflects the way the ice on Mercury does which has been measured. We can estimate a percentage of the area that is "pure ice". We estimated that to be less than three- tenths of a percent of the area that we illuminated, so that's like 100 square kilometers.

Q: So the area that you illuminated, is that in the bottom of this crater?

A: We illuminated the whole area, this whole area was illuminated. So of the area we illuminated, we estimated about a third of the area was permanently shadowed. This is all in the paper, by the way, it's in the Science paper. So that percentage is reflecting like ice.

Q: So it's incorrect to talk of one pond or one lake...

A: Right.

Q: How far was the Apollo landing from this spot, and did the Apollo landings make a mistake by not looking in this area?

A: No. The Apollo landings were all close to the equator. The farthest away from the equator that we got on Apollo 15 was 26 degrees, and this is at 90 degrees south. That was designed primarily for safety reasons. On Apollo they wanted a free return trajectory; in case there was a problem with the spacecraft, the astronauts would just loop around the moon and come back. So it wasn't a mistake, they were sent to the equator by design.

Q: What do you think this would look like if you could go right down and see it? Would you see a fairly large pond here, other ponds all over the place, some ice in crevices and rocks?

A: You would probably see... First of all you wouldn't see anything because you'd be in the dark. But if you had a flashlight and you illuminated the surface, you would see a surface that looked not unlike any place else on the moon, but if you were to dig down into that and pull it up, you would find that there would be ice crystals contained in the interstices between the dust grains. So it's not a sheet or a pond. It's not an ice rink on the moon. It's basically ice mixed into the dirt.

Q: What's the presumptive volume of it then, and how did you discern that?

A: As I mentioned, what we can tell from looking at the radar return is roughly the area that is covered by this. Assuming it reflects ice like ice on Mercury -- making that assumption. That's been well looked at. Then in order to see this back scatter effect, this roadside reflector effect; it's estimated that we have to see some number of wavelengths of our radar into the ice. In reviewing the paper, several of the reviewers posited we probably need to see somewhere between 50 and 100 wavelengths. So our wavelength is about six inches. So at the thickest case, it's roughly 50 feet.

Q: That translates to what in volume?

A: We were very conservative in the press release, but if you take basically 100 square kilometers by roughly 50 feet, you get a volume of something like a quarter of a cubic mile, I think it's on that order. It's a considerable amount, but it's not a huge glacier or anything like that.

Q: Can you compare that with something you know?

A: It's a lake. A small lake.

U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)
News Transcript
Presenter: Dr. Dwight Duston, Assistant Deputy for Technology, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization; December 04, 1996 1:45 PM EST

(Was first released on the web October 2006)

Subject: Discovery of Ice on the Moon

Dr. Dwight Duston, Assistant Deputy for Technology, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization;
Dr. Paul Spudis, Lunar and Planetary Institute, Rice University;
Dr. Stewart Nozette, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory;
Col. Pedro Rustan, USAF, Director, Small Satellite Program, National Reconnaissance Office;
Christopher L. Lichtenberg, Head, RF Active System Section, Naval Research Laboratory; and
Col. Richard Bridges, USA, director, Defense Information, OASD(PA).

www.defenselink.mil...

[edit on 6-5-2008 by zorgon]

I don't think that looks like liquid.

In these photos (from the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth) it's visible that the dust is covering not only the rock but it also covers some of the "water".

AS15-86-11563
AS15-86-11564
AS15-86-11566

And if this was water, from where did it came? There is no water on the ground.
AS15-86-11565

So, I think this is really "glass".

PS: the images were only cropped and level adjusted.

Pretty cool find You guy's!!
ANd Hello Zorgon!! Long time no hear.
As for the pics and the animation, "It might be liquid, but it might not."
The frames that jump on the GIF images kind of looks like shift of light reflection from movement of tong or camera shake.
We already know that our planet and the moon have been pummeled a tremendous amount of times by comets/comet materials, and being's the moon doesn't have our atmosphere to our gravitational pull, and it is only 1/6 to earths size, without an atmosphere, "Who knows, maybe, just maybe, if thing's are as they seem to us scientifically, some form of liquid that would preclude our understanding of H2O to a different heightened possibility that it could be a liquid of a different type.
The "Impact Glass " theory is a strong one too. Without having the sample here on our good ole terra ferma, well, you know what I mean.

Here's some statistics on variances of the moon's temp.

Mean Surface Temperature (Daytime) 107°C
Mean Surface Temperature (Night) -153°C
Maximum Surface Temperature 123°C
Minimum Surface Temperature -233°C
The Moon's surface temperature varies far more than the Earth's. This is due to the Moon's lack of an atmosphere. An atmosphere protects a planet from extremes of heat.

Source:

www.krysstal.com...

Like fatharrytexan said, "It will have to be looked into with an indepth scrutiny of what this actually is ."
Looks as if it even has Internoes scratching his head!!

Sure this thread will be worked over for the studying of it's origin/make/ or conceptional possibilities.

Great find, once again.

Could it be mercury, with a slight coating of dust?
That was the first impression I got when I saw the pictures.

Its melting point is (-38.83 °C, -37.89 °F)
Its boiling point is (356.73 °C, 674.11 °F)

Would it remain in a liquid form at the temp on the moon?


Perhaps other metals in liquid form? caesium, francium, gallium, or rubidium?



[edit on 6-5-2008 by Sparky63]

[edit on 6-5-2008 by Sparky63]

Is my post invisible? It's glass guys. There are more mentions of it in the APollo surface journal. The astronauts talk about it a fair bit in there.

[edit on 6-5-2008 by jra]

It might be water. If you have a very dusty surface and you drop water on to it, the drops collect the dust on their surfaces and look exactly like that.

reply to post by jra


In a manner of speaking. you answered the question, but not as they wanted it to be answered. So it's ingnored in favor of more interesting ideas. and thus ignorance keeps rolling along.
Edit: Pictures finally loaded. It doesn't look like water, it looks more like splateter from something the melted and cooled, like impact glass.

[edit on 6-5-2008 by RuneSpider]

reply to post by jra


I heard you jra lol or read you, before I even got to your post, I was thinking glass for sure, as I looked at the pictures...I vote for glass...now, how does glass form on the moon is the question? Especially huge swatches of it like that? If I wasn't so tired I'd google the temp you need to turn silicone/sand into glass...if it were due to the heat/impact of a meteor strike the whole moon would be covered?

Great pictures OP, star and flag for you!

Just a thought too ...if it were glass, wonder what deep freeze temperature would make it shatter? Curious, very curious.

[edit on 6-5-2008 by LateApexer313]