Water on the Moon: NASA and ISRO Team Up to Confirm H20 Existence

[bebe7]

Excellent team work amongst NASA and ISRO to confirm the moon does indeed have H20.

Well done.

 

[marcus]

Excellent team work amongst NASA and ISRO to confirm the moon does indeed have H20.

Well done.

How about a link to some online source material?

 

[Arch2008]

The ISRO site:
http://www.isro.org/satellites/chandrayaan-1.aspx

Here's a fairly concise story:
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/india-finds-water-on-the-moon/521444/

And here's the good old Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan

So the NASA Moon Mineralogy Mapper Module that was on the ISRO Chandrayaan-1 Probe found evidence of water and hydroxyl in the minerals of lunar soil, something like the equivalent of a few liters of water per ton of lunar soil.

 

[bebe7]

It may sound scant, but on Nova ScienceNow they indicated that there is 6 billion tons of Oxygen within the lunar surface.

 

[Arch2008]

Practically speaking, is it currently feasible to scrape together several tons of lunar topsoil and process enough water out so that one person can stay hydrated for one day? It costs something like 10,000 USD to get one pound into orbit, so what would processing tons of lunar soil cost? Would the cost of sending the processing equipment to the Moon cost more than just sending the water? I suppose that a lot of the process could be automated and use free solar energy to run things, but its not like the water is going to just come to you. Some areas may have no water and the area around a permanent lunar base would eventually be depleted. How much water could we get from mass-driving an icy comet into NEO and what would that cost? Have we found useful water on the Moon?

 

[Cryptonic]

I hope Richard Branson is talking to Rio Tinto & Chinalco about this!

 

[bebe7]

Any endeavor will take a serious financial backing as in the settlement of Jamestown. The colonization of the Moon or Mars would be wonderful and exciting and could be a platform to assist in the proliferation of the Human species, but we seriously need to think about interstellar travel. The Voyager probes are traveling at approximately 3.27 AU's a year at that rate Voyager will reach the star Sirius, on its trajectory, in 256K years...