Moon Water

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xuanmn

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Today on yahoo main page there a topic of "Moon's Water Comes in Three Flavors, Scientists Say". If the moon mass increase what happen? if it increase base on LCROSS's slammed into Lunar adding more mass, if Moon mass increasingly then the rotation orbit it changing too? getting closer to earth?
 
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MeteorWayne

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The moon probably is gaining mass all the time from impacts from meteoroids and asteroids...the amount from LCROSS was not very large by comparison. And the increase in mass causes no change in the moon's orbit. Since the moon is locked to the earth, it causes no change in it's rotation rate either; the same face always points toward the earth and it rotates once per orbit (~ 28 days)
 
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OleNewt

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The moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of like 1.5 inches every 100 years or so (maybe longer, but the point is that the distance between moon and earth is increasing).

Perhaps one day it will reach some peak and start to fall back down, but otherwise after a million years the moon could very well be just another bright star in the universe. It'd take some significant impacts (any one impact large enough to do so would probably cause the moon to explode into shrapnel) to change this, but there's nothing left in the universe large enough to pull that off. At least, not until one of the gas giants explodes.
 
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MeteorWayne

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But the reason has nothing to do with the change in mass of the moon. It is because the angular momentum of the earth-moon system is changing because of the tides the moon raises on earth.

And it will continue moving away for the lifetime of the sun at least.
 
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Gravity_Ray

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I can’t really see anything in near future that can "slam" into the Moon and change either its rotation or its orbit (sci-fi movies excluded).

However, the more interesting topic here is the water on the Moon. There is water there that seems to be young and water that seems to be old (geologically speaking). Anyway, the older water seems to have a lot of other stuff in it that nobody was expecting such as sulfur dioxide and methanol and organic compounds like something called diacetylene (which I had never heard of), but I’m not a scientist.

Anyway, the Moon in the past couple of years has really changed. When I was growing up it was just a dry boring place. Now suddenly there is a lot of reasons to go there. I hope this tickles the fancy of private enterprise enough that a Moon base will be on the table within the next 25 years (at least I hope within my life time).
 
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3488

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I agree Gravity_Ray,

Our oerceptions have changed enormously. I am not surprised to find Sulphur Dioxide on the Moon, in fact I expect it, as the Moon did have active volcanism, many volcanoes still visible on the moon, extinct, but still there. The Marius Hills being a cluster of small shields, Mons Rumker being a multi vent shield, Valentine Dome, Ina D Caldera (possibly active now, venting, not erupting lava, though recently LRO LROC has shown it to be not 'so young'), etc.

But seeing it in a hydrated form IS a huge surprise. That is for sure. That would imply on the face of it geysers, but geysers could NOT have existed on the Moon, as the lack of atmosphere would boil any liquid H2O away instantly!!! I suppose hydrated fumeroles may have been possible???

Further research is going to be required.

Andrew Brown.
 
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