The tax money we spent to find out that useless bit of trivia could probably have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans from unnecessary and excruciatingly painful deaths had it been spent on healthcare instead.
it's good to hear you're for public health care! Good to know the money India spent (the first to find the water) and Cassini (sent 10 years ago to Jupiter) are also important. The other one was an american probe going somewhere else and was in the neighborhood.
I read about this a few days ago. It was an Indian space craft that discovered the water. It says so in the article linked above too: This light wavelength was first discovered by an instrument on the Indian lunar satellite Chandrayaan-1, which stopped operating last month. Scientists initially figured something was wrong with the instrument because everyone knew the moon did not have a drop of water on the surface, Pieters said.
isn't it bizarre that they had data from a probe that already went by the moon 10 years ago that they just didn't check?
I've always heard the moon had really tiny polar ice caps. This article from 1996 confirms they knew about it a while ago: http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec96/IceonMoon.html It also confirms the ideas I've heard about lunar colonies being situated at the poles to have access to the water there. Particularly the south pole. The big news from the Indian probe is that there appears to be water/ice accruing on the moon. At least that's my understanding.
A moon base seems wasteful until they have better propulsion for space travel. I think that is what is special/unique, the liquid form.
They'll use the water as fuel! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...station-thanks-abundance-oxygen-hydrogen.html bam!
So I'm assuming this finding helps bolster the theory that the moon came from the Earth in its early years.
No. They looked at the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts and the composition of the moon is not the same as the earth. You can see the moon has been hit by numerous asteroids and comets. The comets are typically frozen balls of mud and water, so where they hit they leave water. This is likely the source of some of, if not all, the water on the moon. Scientists recently believed all the water on earth came from comets, but that's been disproven. It's a mystery where our water came from. There's so much of it. The Apollo astronauts also left mirrors on the moon that we can bounce lasers off of. For decades, we've measured the distance to the moon using them and have found that the moon is actually moving away from the earth at a few inches per year. At some point it'll be lost from our orbit entirely, but maybe the sun will die before that happens and it'll be moot. More interesting about it moving away is that you can assume it was 5 inches (or whatever) closer last year, 5 the year before, etc. Go back billions of years and the moon was very close. But scientists say you can't go back so far that the moon and earth occupied the same space. This NASA article suggests that the moon was created by an impact between earth and a planet about the size of mars. http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question38.html
I learned bad science I learned like 3 theories concerning the moon: fission, condensation, and capture. Never knew of the comets thing you mentioned. The most current one is the impact one, and it seems very plausible. I didnt fully understand until Neil degrasse Tyson simplified it in a movie. I knew about the moon getting further and further and it has always fascinated me the possibilities of how the early earth started. The last I heard is that micro-organisms formed and around the same time the water started a comin. I forget the details.
well as I understand, hydrogen is the most abundant in the universe. And Oxygen occurs obviously enough. Combining the two from various radiation, makes sense to me.
