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Water on the moon: It’s been there all along


Waspie_Dwarf

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Water on the moon: It’s been there all along

ANN ARBOR—Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early moon. The new findings indicate that the early moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the moon's formation.

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"obtained during the apollo missions" For those who deny "disclosure" just because they haven't introduced us to our "space brothers" here it is. Disclosure with a capital D.

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"obtained during the apollo missions" For those who deny "disclosure" just because they haven't introduced us to our "space brothers" here it is. Disclosure with a capital D.

Huh?
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Huh?

What, you wouldn't call this disclosure? It seems like they just disclosed that there is water on the moon.
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You would think if the moon was formed because of a collision with Earth it would of lost all of its water. Maybe that theory isn't right and there is water on more planets than we think.

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hehehhehhe... this is spin control for the space-x community , the NASA political type's held out on what they found as a "national security" issue , and need to leak out what the private sector is going to fall over when they get to the moon.

they are playing the world for a fool ...and useing these guys to let every one know there is water on the moon...

because they know that some one they can not control is going to find this out with out their spin control later .

better let us know now... then look like fools who couldn't find a drop of water at the sea shore ...

this is pretty predictable .

what may not be predictable is is follow the path back up the channel to see who is doing this ... NASA is of course , but look more closely at what also happens at this university ...

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hehehhehhe... this is spin control for the space-x community , the NASA political type's held out on what they found as a "national security" issue , and need to leak out what the private sector is going to fall over when they get to the moon.

they are playing the world for a fool ...and useing these guys to let every one know there is water on the moon...

because they know that some one they can not control is going to find this out with out their spin control later .

better let us know now... then look like fools who couldn't find a drop of water at the sea shore ...

this is pretty predictable .

what may not be predictable is is follow the path back up the channel to see who is doing this ... NASA is of course , but look more closely at what also happens at this university ...

Possibly, but there is always the remote possibility that the technology wasn't advanced enough to know this before. (although I find that a little tough to swallow)

Edited by OverSword
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The discovery of primordial water on the Moon seems to rule out the Theia-collision-with-Earth scenario of the creation of the Moon. This water would very probably have been volatilized in the collision. Back to the previous status quo, maybe, which was quite unsatisfactory.

The Moon, in a nearly circular orbit of Earth, which aligns closely with the angle of Earth's spin does not move like a captured body. The Earth and Moon have very different mineral compositions, which argues against their forming together, out of the same primordial material, in the same region of space. We may be about out of explanations.

Perhaps the Moon came to be where it is as part of a astrophysical mega-engineering project, after all. Anyone for a hyperspace bypass?

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I don't see how the discovery of water could refute the current formation theory. Couldn't comets account for it? The moon is a veritable impact map. Those weren't all asteroidal hits.

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The rocks were found to have have water integral to their mineral structure. They are believed to have formed before water collection from comets would have occurred, in the (supposed) post-Theia-impact era.

Edited by bison
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The rocks were found to have have water integral to their mineral structure. They are believed to have formed before water collection from comets would have occurred, in the (supposed) post-Theia-impact era.

Ah okay. Well, maybe back to the drawing board on moon formation.

Not to hijack the topic...and just as an aside....I've always wondered why the moon is perpetually moving away from us (about 1 cm per yr if memory serves). And what a computer might come up with if you reversed that and kind of rolled it back in time.

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Of course there is water on the moon...it's just in a dehydrated state and they haven't figured out what to add to it yet...

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Ah okay. Well, maybe back to the drawing board on moon formation.

Not to hijack the topic...and just as an aside....I've always wondered why the moon is perpetually moving away from us (about 1 cm per yr if memory serves). And what a computer might come up with if you reversed that and kind of rolled it back in time.

The Earth and Moon have a close tidal relationship. Since angular momentum is conserved, it is transfered from Earth to Moon, as the Moon slows the Earth's rotation with its gravity. This makes the Moon swing in an ever wider orbit. Working backwards, the Moon was clearly closer to the Earth at one time. We don't know exactly how close, as the rate of retreat is not believed to have been constant. Perhaps as close as several tens of thousands of miles. Edited by bison
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What, you wouldn't call this disclosure? It seems like they just disclosed that there is water on the moon.

It was "disclosed" and proven in 2008, also:

"March 2010, it was reported that the Mini-RF on board the India's Chandrayaan-1 had discovered more than 40 permanently darkened craters near the Moon's north pole which are hypothesized to contain an estimated 600 million metric tonnes(1.3 trillion pounds) of water-ice" WIKI

so nothing new here.

Edited by keithisco
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It was "disclosed" and proven in 2008, also:

"March 2010, it was reported that the Mini-RF on board the India's Chandrayaan-1 had discovered more than 40 permanently darkened craters near the Moon's north pole which are hypothesized to contain an estimated 600 million metric tonnes(1.3 trillion pounds) of water-ice" WIKI

so nothing new here.

The new discovery of hydrated minerals is different from that of actual ice deposits. Ice could have been brought to the Moon at any time by comet impacts. In general terms, it has probably slowly accumulated for a very long time. The hydrated minerals, which contain water as a part of the chemical composition of their minerals, are believed to be from very ancient materials, exclusively. How this water would not have been removed by the forces present, if the Moon was created in the giant impact scenario, is very difficult to explain.
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it is important to remember... because of the near zero pressure , water goes from solide to gas with out a liquid state.

also... the magnetic feild of the earth does not currently sheild the moon from solar wind...

togather : when ever the sun shines , surface water is carried away that is heated above frozen . if this is true , then for there to be water on the moon... either there was a great deal of water at one time in the past.... or.... the earths magnetic feild was pretty far out there ....or.... there is something going on here that we do not understand .

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The ice deposits either found or inferred to exist on the Moon are in permanently shaded areas, near the poles, or well beneath the surface. Sunlight never strikes them. There is virtually no atmosphere on the Moon to conduct heat to these areas. They could remain frozen indefinitely.

In any case, this does not appear to apply to the water ( actually hydroxyl ) found in certain minerals on the Moon. This is not ice, but merely the chemical constituents of water.

This substance should not be found in Lunar minerals at all, if the Moon was created by the process detailed in the Giant Impact scenario, the most widely accepted scientific explanation for the existence of the Moon. The great heat involved would have boiled all traces of it out of the rocks, and reduced it to gases.

If this discovery of the constituents of water in Lunar mineral stands, the Giant Impact scenario, and presumably any impact sufficient to create the Moon will have to be discarded.

Given the failure of other explanations for the origin of the Moon to stand up to careful scientific scrutiny, we are left with a real mystery, right in our own cosmic back yard. Why does the Moon exist at all? It hangs above us in sky, like a giant question mark.

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The Moon appears to be radically deficient in iron. Its small core of this element is about one quarter of its radius wide. Earth's iron core is about half the planet's radius. Yet the Moon has isotope ratios of several other elements very similar to those of our planet.

It appears possible that the Moon largely formed elsewhere in space, then acquired a coating of Earth-like materials when it came into the vicinity of our planet. How it might have approached Earth, and have gone into close orbit of our planet is not clear.

The idea that a passing body the size of the Moon could be captured by Earth, and end up it its present orbit appears so improbable as to seem almost absurd. It would be far, far more likely to collide with the primordial Earth and be absorbed by it, or be thrown into a grossly elliptical orbit, or be thrown free of Earth, altogether.

Edited by bison
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The Moon is conspicuously asymmetric in its appearance. The near side is marked by many large, dark 'maria', or 'seas', areas of dark, basaltic stone. The far side has almost none of these. The maria are thought to be fields of volcanic eruptions that occurred eons ago, before the Moon lost most of its heat.

It is interesting to observe that many of the maria are distinctly round. Current scientific thinking about the Moon does not rule out the possibility that the maria were huge impact basins, into which lava flowed. These impacts may have even triggered the eruptions, by fracturing the the lunar rock to a considerable depth.

It seems natural to wonder why huge impact basins should appear on only one side of the Moon. Perhaps this happened to the Moon, if it moved through a great distance before arriving near Earth. One can imagine it moving through space, and, for some reason, not rotating. It would sweep up impacts on its leading side; plowing through the heavy debris known to exist in our solar system, about 4 billion years ago, during the time known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Edited by bison
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The idea of a celestial body not having rotated at all, at some point in its existence, even a modest-sized one like the Moon, seems absurd. Every such body of which we are aware rotates in some fashion. Rotation is integral to our understanding of how natural bodies form in space, from in-falling debris.

If there is a credible alternative explanation for how the Moon came to have large impact basins on only one of its sides, I would like to hear of it. In the meantime I will muse about the apparently very unnatural motions of the Moon, both in seeming not to rotate at one time, and in the odd way, and against all probability, it appears to have inserted itself into a nearly circular orbit of Earth.

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Given the possibility that the Giant Impact scenario will not prove to be the most likely version of Earth/Moon history, a look at an alternate timeline seems worthwhile: Earth and the other planets of our solar system are believed to have condensed out of circumsolar debris about 4.6 billion years ago. The origin of the Moon and its oldest surface, represented by the highlands terrain, is thought to have been about 4.5 billion years ago.

If we speculate that the Moon was in transit from elsewhere from that point, until around 3.8 billion years ago, we can account for it receiving the large impacts on its nearer side, in the Late Heavy Bombardment, which probably ran from about around 4 to 3.8 billion years ago. Once it can into orbit of Earth, the Moon presumably soon became tidally locked to our planet, assuming a rotation period of the same length as the time it took to orbit around Earth. Since this would have exposed nearly the entire surface of the Moon to the Late Heavy Bombardment, it appears that this must have been nearing its end by this time.

Given the several isotopic ratios which are very similar on both Earth and Moon, it seems reasonable that a good deal of debris kicked up from Earth by the LHB could have fallen onto the Moon, which was much closer to Earth than it is now. This could account for the confusing clues that otherwise seem to indicate that the Earth and Moon are made of the same material, and were thus formed in the same immediate region of circumsolar space.

Edited by bison
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The idea of a celestial body not having rotated at all, at some point in its existence, even a modest-sized one like the Moon, seems absurd. Every such body of which we are aware rotates in some fashion. Rotation is integral to our understanding of how natural bodies form in space, from in-falling debris.

If there is a credible alternative explanation for how the Moon came to have large impact basins on only one of its sides, I would like to hear of it.

In the meantime I will muse about the apparently very unnatural motions of the Moon, both in seeming not to rotate at one time, and in the odd way, and against all probability, it appears to have inserted itself into a nearly circular orbit of Earth.

lets give the moon a rotation ( common sense tells us that there is currently no body in space at this time that does not have a period of rotation [ not one ] ). if the moon were traveling in the direction of axis ... then the north traveling body would have only one side north facing , and only one side would plow threw the northern derbis ...

the shape of the moon suggests that it was born a moon... but its core suggests it was not the child of the earth .

venus has a iron core the size of earths... and mars has a smaller core than earth , but still not a good parent match for the moon...

the astroid feild between mars and earth is the best hope for a match ... but the location of the feild would make a planetary body hard to speculate with precsion... but thats where i would start looking ...

best guess , earth and mars ripped the sibling planet apart... and earth stole its moon .

the moon took a slow degenarate path , falling into the sun ... and then parked in a paraellel orbit with earth , stealing the orbital gravity energy of earths well... slowing and speeding.... untill we have what we see now .

the moon did not have the speed or dencity to fly out of the solar system , and it had the mass needed to get the suns attention .

it was on its way to the sun when it slipped in to earths solar orbit , its parent planet was traveling in the same orbital direction as earth so the meeting was not so remarkable . the current face of the moon was out facing , away from earth ... and it very slowly turned to face the earth... but we see the history of what life was like for an orphan moon .

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Thanks, Onereaderone, for your reply. I agree, common sense would seem to indicate that the Moon has always had some rotation, not just since it encountered Earth. Common sense comes from past applicable experiences. What if the Moon is, as it appears, unique, and unprecedented? If it is, we will not have the experiential basis for common sense, where it is concerned.

I'm not familiar with an 'asteroid field' between Earth and Mars. True, some asteroids spend much of their time in this part of the solar system, but I've never heard it called a field. There is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but that is gravitationally under the sway of Jupiter, not Mars, or Earth.

The capture of the Moon by the Earth as it flew near, has a serious problem. The Moon's orbit is nearly circular, not what would be expected of a captured body. The capture hypothesis has been considered nearly untenable for a long time, which is why the giant impact hypothesis was advanced. Now it too begins to look doubtful.

I'm not saying that the Moon was captured by the Earth, merely that it presumably went into orbit of our planet at some point. I'm not saying that the Moon just happened to have no rotation, but that non-rotation is a relatively simple means of explaining the asymmetry of large impact basins on only one side.

Edited by bison
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To cover a couple more points of Onereaderone's post: The idea of the Moon traveling in the direction its axis pointed, and so accumulating impacts on what we'll call its Northern hemisphere is interesting. I considered this possibility myself.

A problem I perceive with this idea is that the Moon's rotation would have to be stopped, and then restarted with a different spin axis 90 degrees from the original one. Merely flipping the axis by about 90 degrees wouldn't do, because then half of the Moon nearside would have large impact basins, and presumably 'seas', and the other half wouldn't. Also, half of the Moon's farside would have large basins and seas. This isn't what we observe.

I can see the Moon acquiring a tidally locked spin fairly easily when it went into orbit of the Earth. Canceling out its former supposed rotational momentum looks more difficult to explain. We might have ended up with a Moon that keeps the same longitude pointing at Earth, but rotating at 90 degree or so, pointing an ever-changing latitude our way.

The near passage of the Earth by the Moon, in the usual way of thinking, could have one of four possible outcomes. 1.) The Moon has its path modified by the Earth's gravity but fails to go into orbit, instead assuming an independent orbit of the Sun. 2.) The Moon is captured in an eccentric orbit of Earth. 3.) The Moon strikes the Earth, and is absorbed into it. 4.) The Moon assumes a nearly circular orbit of Earth.

There are many different solar orbits that could have been assumed by the Moon in the first possibility, depending on the circumstances. So, too, many highly eccentric orbits of the Moon around Earth are possible. There are also many ways the Earth could have been struck by the Moon. Dead center, offset from the center in any direction, and any of a number of different glancing blows.

The fact that, on average, the Moon's nearest approach to Earth is nearly 90 per cent of its farthest passage shows that its orbit is remarkably close to circular, given all the other possible outcomes. The chances of this just happening to be the case are remote enough to make the capture process, as it is usually understood, almost untenable. It's no wonder the Giant Impact hypothesis was proposed as an alternative, and that it became so widely accepted in scientific circles. A pity that it now looks as if it, too, may have to be discarded. A beautiful theory spoiled by an ugly little fact?

Edited by bison
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What, you wouldn't call this disclosure? It seems like they just disclosed that there is water on the moon.

About the water on the moon, this has been known for decades. Its not a news at all....

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