Water Ice Found on Moon's North Pole

www.universetoday.com...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/a811eed5b1bd.jpg[/atsimg]
Craters at the north craters. Credit: NASA of the Moon. Red mean fresh craters and green means anomalous

Quote from source:
It's no longer a question of if there is water on the Moon; now it is how much. Scientists using the Mini-SAR instrument on India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft have detected water ice deposits near the moon's north pole. Mini-SAR, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 2 to15 km (1 to 9 miles) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it is estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice.

"The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon," said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. "The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought."
During the past year, the Mini-SAR mapped the moon's permanently-shadowed polar craters that aren't visible from Earth. The radar uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize surface properties. Results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.

I thought I would post this, not because we do not already own this, but because now there are pictures!!

Interesting to see so much of it and I really do not get how we could have seen any sign of it before. I just thought I would keep us all up to date!!

Any thoughts?

Pred...

Nice post OP thanks!

but would like to see some LARGER images from you know who~!

So water on the Moon would prove life does exist there at least in microbiological terms ....

.... but then again...

...we already know what else is probably up there right now (apart from us of course)

Its a shame that we don't get to see a better image

whats with all the blanked out bits .

"The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought."

Ha ha ha previously thought from when?

Thanks for the thread predator0187

Ocker

Hey pred, there is no reason why water should not exist on the moon. In fact, logically, if all the water on Earth arrived via comets (as is the current theory), it would seem ridiculous to think that there is no water on the moon.

What, it's never been hit by a comet?

That said, LIQUID water cannot exist at very low atmospheric pressures i.e. the near vacuum of the atmosphere on the moon. I tends to boil.

The only way this could be true is if the moon has a much more dense atmosphere than we are lead to believe.

Water on the moon is not at all unusual. In fact, the absence would be.

Liquid water (a decent atmosphere), now that's interesting.........

Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water ice held within these impact craters.

The equivalent amount, expressed as rocket fuel, would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years, he told journalists at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

BBC News article
news.bbc.co.uk...

So, no need to bring water to a future moon base and its also fuel for rockets. This is good news indeed.

[edit on 2-3-2010 by rhines]

Fueling ships with water from the moon discovered 15 years ago

According to Bill Stones "during the mission he said they discovered a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton Creator on the south pole of the moon and that the Hydrogen signature was that strong that it could have only been produced by 10 trillion tonnes of water." He says that this can be used to fuel ships in space at a 14th of the cost compared to fuelling them from earth.

reply to post by predator0187


OMG OMG OMG~!!!!! wait.. what ....it's..... Water.. really .. !! ... oh ..

Im sure they have a much better image than that i would love to see it as would a lot on this site.

How many times are they going to say look we found water whats the point Obama already said no to moon but i hope some other country is going to go there.

It's way past time we want the good images of the moon we know they have them.

As to what else is up there more petrified wood anyone.

THANKYOU

Originally posted by watchZEITGEISTnow
So water on the Moon would prove life does exist there at least in microbiological terms ....

Not exactly no. It proves nothing whatsoever. There's water on the moon in the form of ice. Certainly not in liquid form... And ice does not necessarily mean your going to naturally find extremophiles. Some of those craters are colder than Pluto.

IRM

600 million metric tonnes of water ice. ?

i guess that's if future lunar explorers could gather up 100% of the stuff...

but what if the comet ice is some kind of strange water isotope an can't be consumed or filtered for other uses?

i also wonder if the calculation of tonnage is in Lunar gravity or converted to Earth gravity ~ remember on the moon everything weighs 1/6th its weight on earth ~


in any case, India or China will have to fight over the water rights on Luna... as Pres. 0-bama has stricken out the US moon mission program

We dont need that lousy moon water. We can take our own water... when it weighs nothing. And that's what it would weigh, if NASA would ever stop wasting money on rockets, and develop anti-gravity levitation/propulsion. Or steal it from the the over-funded military's TR-3B.

[edit on 3/2/2010 by Larryman]

[edit on 3/2/2010 by Larryman]

reply to post by St Udio



You seem a bit confused. Let me help you :

In the physical sciences, mass and weight are different properties. Mass is a measure of the amount of matter in the body while weight is a measure of the force on the object caused by a gravitational field. (wiki)

Tons are tons.

Originally posted by InfaRedMan

Originally posted by watchZEITGEISTnow
So water on the Moon would prove life does exist there at least in microbiological terms ....

Not exactly no. It proves nothing whatsoever. There's water on the moon in the form of ice. Certainly not in liquid form... And ice does not necessarily mean your going to naturally find extremophiles.
IRM

You've got your facts wrong! Are you aware that viable microbes were isolated from layers of the Antarctic ice sheet that dates back about 200 000 years? So then, it is well within the realms of possibility that there exist some form of microbial life within the ice sheets in those craters.