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Moon More Metallic Than Researchers Thought


Waspie_Dwarf

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Radar Points to Moon Being More Metallic Than Researchers Thought

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What started out as a hunt for ice lurking in polar lunar craters turned into an unexpected finding that could help clear some muddy history about the Moon’s formation.

Team members of the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft found new evidence that the Moon’s subsurface might be richer in metals, like iron and titanium, than researchers thought. That finding, published July 1 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, could aid in drawing a clearer connection between Earth and the Moon.

arrow3.gif  Read More: NASA

 

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11 minutes ago, glorybebe said:

So, now it will be a race to mine it?  

Not unless space travel becomes a cheap daily routine. Right now the price is too high to retrieve anything from space, on an industrial scale.

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11 minutes ago, glorybebe said:

So, now it will be a race to mine it?  

That ship has already sailed:

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Trump signs executive order to support moon mining, tap asteroid resources

The water ice and other lunar resources that will help the United States establish a long-term human presence on the moon are there for the taking, the White House believes.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime — notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — allows the use of such resources

arrow3.gif  Read More: Space.com

 

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1 minute ago, zep73 said:

Not unless space travel becomes a cheap daily routine. Right now the price is too high to retrieve anything from space, on an industrial scale.

Who says it needs to be retrieved?

The largest single cost of doing anything in space is escaping Earth's gravity. Even with the huge cost reductions that SpaceX has brought about it is still hugely expensive to launch into space.

If large colonies are to be built in orbit (as envisaged by Jeff Bezos), or on the moon, or even large scale colonisation of Mars (as envisaged by Elon Musk) then the low surface gravity of the moon will make launching objects from there considerably cheaper than launching them from Earth.

The idea behind mining the moon is not to bring the resources back to earth, it is to negate the need to launch them from the earth.

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10 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

The idea behind mining the moon is not to bring the resources back to earth, it is to negate the need to launch them from the earth.

Of course.

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It would be much easier to build in space or on the moon with resources already there, that is for sure. 

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14 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

Who says it needs to be retrieved?

The largest single cost of doing anything in space is escaping Earth's gravity. Even with the huge cost reductions that SpaceX has brought about it is still hugely expensive to launch into space.

If large colonies are to be built in orbit (as envisaged by Jeff Bezos), or on the moon, or even large scale colonisation of Mars (as envisaged by Elon Musk) then the low surface gravity of the moon will make launching objects from there considerably cheaper than launching them from Earth.

The idea behind mining the moon is not to bring the resources back to earth, it is to negate the need to launch them from the earth.

Sorry, speak to me like a toddler.

what is the point of mining the moon if not to bring it back?

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