NASA's sensor discovers Lunar water on India's Chandrayaan-1

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MeteorWayne

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NASA TV News Conference on Moon Water

I realize this conflicts with the Live event at SDC today, but wanted to let everyone know.

MEDIA ADVISORY : M09-183 NASA To Reveal New Scientific Findings About The Moon
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media briefing at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Sept. 24, to discuss new science data from the moon collected during national and international space missions. NASA Television and the agency's Web site will provide live coverage of the briefing from the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW, in Washington.

The briefing participants are:
- Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington
- Carle Pieters, principal investigator, Moon Mineralogy Mapper, Brown University
- Rob Green, project instrument scientist, Moon Mineralogy Mapper, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
- Roger Clark, team member, Cassini spacecraft Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer and co-investigator, Moon Mineralogy Mapper, U.S. Geological Survey in Denver
- Jessica Sunshine, deputy principal investigator for NASA’s Deep Impact extended mission and co-investigator for Moon Mineralogy Mapper, Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland

Papers supporting the briefing will be published online by the journal Science at its Science Express Web site. Science will lift its embargo at 2 p.m. EDT, Sept. 24.

For more information about NASA TV downlinks and streaming video, visit:


http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
 
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nimbus

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Hopefully these data slides will be released too.
 
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MeteorWayne

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

They already are, but I'm watching a martian water ice news teleconference with images right now so don't have time to put in the link. Please stand by... :)
 
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nimbus

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

So I don't even have to find em myself? :lol: You rock Wayne. Thanks!
 
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MeteorWayne

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Here is the link:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/fea ... mages.html

What a busy day. It's hard to say what was more astounding, or useful in the furture exploration of our neighborhood in the solar system. Water on the Moon, or ice a meter below the surface across much of the Martian surface. Whew!!

And the SDC chat with Ashley was great too!!

I need to go split some wood while I absorb all this info :)

What an incredible day for planetary science, and I will be sitting by the mailbox next week for my issue of Science. It will be an issue to put on the top shelf.
 
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nimbus

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Thank you.
 
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nimbus

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Well, Joel aka h20universe must be too busy to comment here :p Anyone know where else he hangs out? I'm curious what his thoughts are.
 
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h2ouniverse

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Hi Nimbus,
I was indeed busy. This being said my alias comes from the conviction that H2O is present on almost all planetary bodies, and this alias was in reaction to the pessimistic and widespread (although wrong) view that the Earth is an oasis in a dry spatial desert. Although the Earth is special, none of its features are likely to be unique when taken individually. The combination of these features is another matter. Any planetary body is probably a unique cocktail of more or less Earth-like features and how close the cocktail has to be to Earth's one in order to support life is another debate....

Although I'm glad that the anti-Copernician illusion of this "Earth-as-the-only-place-with-water-in-the-inner-solar-system" is taking another blow, I get the impression that there is a lot of media overhyping there. Ultra-bright water ice at mid-latitudes on Mars at the bottom of ultra-recent craters had been announced in science congresses in 2008 (I know at least one in September 2008) so no revolutionary news.
The production of H2O by interaction between the protons of the Solar wind and the oxygen atoms of oxides is not new either. Still to be confirmed: the presence of significant quantities of H2O in the polar craters of the Moon. Would sound logical to me but no evidence so far. The quantities of H2O per square kilometer at Moon's mid-latitudes that are announced look extremely low (one glass of water per baseball field I heared?) and it is still to be demonstrated that the energy required to extract 1 ton of water from these deposits would be lower than the energy needed to bring this ton of water from the Earth, and/or to the energy required to synthetize locally H2O from oxides and hydrogen.... The potential mechanism that would concentrate h2O in the polar regions through cycles of evaporation/redeposition is interesting though and I would suspect it to occur on the other bodies with a near-zero axial tilt such as Mercury or Ceres.
Best regards.
 
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nimbus

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Re: NASA TV News Conference on Moon at 2 PM EDT today

Yeah it is overhyping, but that's not as bad a problem as not being reported at all; or at least not even registering on joe public's radar. A summer back, I was working at a construction site to pay tuition, and neither the average foreman or worker or even a couple of the top bosses knew that Mars has any water. They insisted there was none out there and that space was therefore a barren wasteland not worth tax money. These notions need to be set straight. So I think some overhyping is an ok price to pay for it.

As far as cost of H2O on-site extraction VS as a payload from Earth, I think I saw someone do a BOE that gave 200k$ to deliver a gallon or liter to the moon. And during the week I know I saw one article that mentionned someone involved in regolith processing who said that you could hold a microwave plate above it and have the water sublimate and freeze onto the plate. So that you could literally just scrape it off afterwards. That sounds pretty cheap.

And yeah it was real easy to make the connection, that if this was happening on the moon, it isn't far fetched that it'll happen elsewhere too. Makes one want to grab the data for the rest of the solar system and find other candidate locations this is happening at.
Now we just have to wait and see if this try can be converted into a real big deal if LCROSS hits not just solar wind migration water but comet reserves too. :)
 
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Smersh

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Re: Indian spacecraft seems to have detected water on the moon

Hi Rob, thanks for the info and the link to the article at SDC.

I'm a little curious though as to why you are the only one that's posted so far, when this is possibly the most significant discovery so far in the history of space exploration? :eek:
 
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MeteorWayne

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Re: Indian spacecraft seems to have detected water on the moon

It's actually the Same story as the NASA News Conference about water on the moon.

"NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument reported the observations. M3 was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft."

In fact, I will probably merge these threads.
 
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Smersh

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Re: Indian spacecraft seems to have detected water on the moon

OK Wayne thanks for the info. I just found that thread now but it wasn't there when I started this one. Anyway please merge as neccessary. I saw Doublehelix's poll btw and voted in it.
 
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MeteorWayne

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Re: Indian spacecraft seems to have detected water on the moon

Yeah I see this topic was started a few hours earlier. We sere still sleeping :)

To reduce confusion, I'll combine them and come up with an appropriate title for the combined threads.
 
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Eman_3

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Re: Indian spacecraft seems to have detected water on the moon

Here's some interesting mosiac pictures.

hydrogen.jpg


http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1478.html
 
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