NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.
h/t Chris
The NASA announcement was really MSM-bait.
If you read it carefully it says that they have detected radiation that can be due to a few different molecules, but they *think* that only water molecules are *likely* to be the cause on the Moon.
So it could be from a variety of sources. They say water because based upon what they think they know, the others are less likely.
The other point is that this would be water molecules, not free-standing water. You couldn’t hammer a pipe into the ground and expect water to gush out. The water molecules are likely tightly bound to others in various compounds. Separating out the H2O molecules could be more or less difficult and energy intensive.
You would probably need some sort of loader-dump truck situation feeding a large processing plant to extract usable water quantities. Still pretty interesting. I think it’s cool how you can get usable data from a telescope mounted on a flying 747 aircraft.
i heard enough to fill a sports bottle , at this range might be a statistical aberration
The next NASA appointed astronaut will be a well digger.
Will the ability to dowse for water be a mandatory job requirement?
“Roughneck.” Where have I heard that term before? Hmmm….
Quick, let’s move.
As usual, Trump is all over this. “With Moon Water Announcement, Trump Proposes Space Navy.”
“We’ll get big, beautiful space battleships to put on the oceans of the moon,” Trump said. “And they’ll have big space cannons ready for any space water threats out there, like space sharks. Or maybe space pirates — but not the regular space pirates that fly around in spaceships but space water pirates.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/with-moon-water-announcement-trump-proposes-space-navy?fbclid=IwAR1MtN3d6rASmZSrlZeSqsx_4JKySXXvMQ_7jQbcTzsBrgcNVdbkLuhtmxk
Before Timmy’s, others’ heads explode from setting their hair on fire, note this is from Babylon Bee, so satire, if that wasn’t obvious.
BS, everyone knows the Moon is flat!
Nah. It’s made of green cheese.
Better a little water from the Moon than a lot from Uranus.
Ah may ha’e nubber gruduaded grade 4 but I knows that water boils/evaporates at low pressure. The atmosphere on the moon is about as perfect a vacuum as we can generate here on earth so… One of those great mysteries NASA never explains. What great power does the moon have to keep water a liquid or a solid in an almost perfect vacuum. Then there is the small matter of if water existed on the moon it would exist in vapor form not liquid or solid so how about the tests done by the Apollo missions where they found the moon’s atmosphere is made up of helium argon and a few other gases including CO2.
Yes.
But water can exist in the interstitial areas of sedimentary rocks, bound to sand grains and found within any “cementation” that bounds sand grains together. Also a fair amount (relatively speaking) of water molecules will be found within the matrix of many clay-minerals. We are talking tiny amounts of water here.