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Forty years ago, Apollo astronauts brought back lunar samples that gave us insight into the geological processes on the moon, with the discovery of the Genesis rock and samples of anorthocite, and a new understanding of the basalt mare on the equatorial lunar surface.
Today, data from LCROSS(the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) and LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) are giving us insight into possible hydrodynamic processes on the moon, the movement of water and organic molecules through the solar system, and even perhaps the history of the inside of our sun.
Not to mention hopeful news for further human exploration, and even habitation, on the moon.
NASA released on Friday preliminary findings from the LCROSS impact which took place last month. The panel consisted of Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator at Ames Research Center and senior scientist on the LCROSS mission; Gregory Delory from the Space Science Center at UC Berkeley; and Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA HQ; they were also joined remotely by Doug Cook, NASA Associate Administrator. Though they joked quite a bit about the Moon being a "dusty attic" and discussed the amount of water as compared to the Atacama desert in Chile (the driest desert on Earth), the findings they released today were both stunning and exhilarating.
Dr Colaprete kicked things off with some photographs of the impact plume; though they had perhaps been disappointing on the night of the impact, the newly released photos show a well-formed impact-plume with a low-density, high-angle reaching heights of several kilometers, and a high-density, low-angle cone spraying ejecta about 150km out from the blast site. (Vindication for those of us who stayed up late, or got up early, to watch the originally uninspiring views of the blast.)
Colaprete and his team used two independent methods to reach this conclusion. LCROSS was outfitted with two spectrometers, one designed to look at the near-Infrared and one at the Ultra-violet spectrum of the plume. The infrared spectroscope returned not only stunning details of the never-before-seen floor of the crater Cabeus, but also the telltale dips and wiggles of compounds which absorb NIR light. The best-fit line described conclusively the presence of water, as well as some other interesting compounds possibly including, but not limited to: carbon dioxide, methane, ethanol, and sulfur dioxide1. Earth-based observatories also picked up strong sodium emission lines.
The second spectrometer recorded light at the UV end of the spectrum, and here they were looking specifically for the presence of OH, or hydroxyl, by scanning for emission lines from that compound as the debris plume passed through the light from the sun.
The headline? Without water, these lines don't exist.
NASA researchers actually knew beforehand that they would indeed find water; Chandrayaan, the Indian satellite which has been in lunar orbit for about a year, sent back images which showed single-molecule layers of water, mostly adsorbed on layers of lunar regolith, during its mission. So what was surprising to Colaprete & Co. was not the presence of water, but the quantity.
In a small field of view, a fraction of the the 20m crater, they project findings of roughly 94 liters (25 gallons of water), amazing when we consider that they had been looking for quantities more like a teaspoon in a football field.
The other surprise was the presence of those organic molecules. Gregory Delory hinted at some interesting possible causes for their presence, including the passage of a molecular cloud through the solar system, as well as processes inside the sun which pass over the moon in a solar wind and shed these materials on the surface.
These pieces of evidence may suggest that the Moon may not have a static water system: it's possible that water moves over the surface from the equatorial mare and highlands to the polar craters; the polar regions have an average temperature of about -233 degrees centigrade and may form "cold sinks" or "cold traps" for the water and other materials, trapping them at the bottoms of craters like Cabeus. The polar regions would thus be an endpoint for a dynamic hydration system-- unthinkable in the time of Apollo.
The team advises us that while these results are accurate, especially the concentration of water, they are also preliminary and necessarily incomplete. Getting the word out about the water was paramount, and thus their focus so far has been on that data. The researchers hope to hold another press conference in the early spring to talk about their findings on the organic compounds, and more studies on the hydration processes as there is still quite a bit more data from LCROSS to analyze.
So stay tuned!
Today, data from LCROSS(the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) and LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) are giving us insight into possible hydrodynamic processes on the moon, the movement of water and organic molecules through the solar system, and even perhaps the history of the inside of our sun.
Not to mention hopeful news for further human exploration, and even habitation, on the moon.
NASA released on Friday preliminary findings from the LCROSS impact which took place last month. The panel consisted of Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator at Ames Research Center and senior scientist on the LCROSS mission; Gregory Delory from the Space Science Center at UC Berkeley; and Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA HQ; they were also joined remotely by Doug Cook, NASA Associate Administrator. Though they joked quite a bit about the Moon being a "dusty attic" and discussed the amount of water as compared to the Atacama desert in Chile (the driest desert on Earth), the findings they released today were both stunning and exhilarating.
Dr Colaprete kicked things off with some photographs of the impact plume; though they had perhaps been disappointing on the night of the impact, the newly released photos show a well-formed impact-plume with a low-density, high-angle reaching heights of several kilometers, and a high-density, low-angle cone spraying ejecta about 150km out from the blast site. (Vindication for those of us who stayed up late, or got up early, to watch the originally uninspiring views of the blast.)
Colaprete and his team used two independent methods to reach this conclusion. LCROSS was outfitted with two spectrometers, one designed to look at the near-Infrared and one at the Ultra-violet spectrum of the plume. The infrared spectroscope returned not only stunning details of the never-before-seen floor of the crater Cabeus, but also the telltale dips and wiggles of compounds which absorb NIR light. The best-fit line described conclusively the presence of water, as well as some other interesting compounds possibly including, but not limited to: carbon dioxide, methane, ethanol, and sulfur dioxide1. Earth-based observatories also picked up strong sodium emission lines.
The second spectrometer recorded light at the UV end of the spectrum, and here they were looking specifically for the presence of OH, or hydroxyl, by scanning for emission lines from that compound as the debris plume passed through the light from the sun.
The headline? Without water, these lines don't exist.
NASA researchers actually knew beforehand that they would indeed find water; Chandrayaan, the Indian satellite which has been in lunar orbit for about a year, sent back images which showed single-molecule layers of water, mostly adsorbed on layers of lunar regolith, during its mission. So what was surprising to Colaprete & Co. was not the presence of water, but the quantity.
In a small field of view, a fraction of the the 20m crater, they project findings of roughly 94 liters (25 gallons of water), amazing when we consider that they had been looking for quantities more like a teaspoon in a football field.
The other surprise was the presence of those organic molecules. Gregory Delory hinted at some interesting possible causes for their presence, including the passage of a molecular cloud through the solar system, as well as processes inside the sun which pass over the moon in a solar wind and shed these materials on the surface.
These pieces of evidence may suggest that the Moon may not have a static water system: it's possible that water moves over the surface from the equatorial mare and highlands to the polar craters; the polar regions have an average temperature of about -233 degrees centigrade and may form "cold sinks" or "cold traps" for the water and other materials, trapping them at the bottoms of craters like Cabeus. The polar regions would thus be an endpoint for a dynamic hydration system-- unthinkable in the time of Apollo.
The team advises us that while these results are accurate, especially the concentration of water, they are also preliminary and necessarily incomplete. Getting the word out about the water was paramount, and thus their focus so far has been on that data. The researchers hope to hold another press conference in the early spring to talk about their findings on the organic compounds, and more studies on the hydration processes as there is still quite a bit more data from LCROSS to analyze.
So stay tuned!
Feeling: 
happy
happy1 spun | spin me a yarn
contemplative
exhausted
creative
energetic
