NASA has been promising an 'exciting' announcement about the Moon for several days. It will be made at 16 hours GMT (Noon Eastern Time, 9 a.m. Pacific time is the U.S.) tomorrow, Monday, October 26th.

No hint of what will be announced has been given. Some have speculated that molecular water has been found on the Moon. Hydroxyl has already been detected, and is considered by some to be a proxy for the presence of water.

NASA has announced that its SOFIA airborne observatory has found water, bound up in Lunar material, on the sunlit surface of the Moon. They calculate that there is about 350 milliliters of water per cubic meter of Lunar soil.

It's not yet clear if the water resides between the mineral grains, which would make it easily accessible, or in some more inaccessible form, such as in glassy vesicles produced by micrometeorite impacts.

The SOFIA observatory was intended for use on much more distant objects than the Moon, but this experimental application still seemed worth trying, and it certainly paid off!

Please find a link, below, to an article from NASA, with further details.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-sofia-discovers-water-on-sunlit-surface-of-moon/

Hey! Thanks for that.

Fantastic stuff both for the find and for SOFIA!


IIRC elsewhere, SOFIA is to not gain further funding despite being a unique astronomical facility...

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Returning to the moon before attempting the long voyage to Mars is making more and more sense. Now that the presence of water at or near the moon's surface has been verified the prospect of using the moon as a launch point to visit the rest of the solar system makes perfect sense. A colony on the moon that doesn't need to import water can be built with relative ease.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

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A colony on the moon that doesn't need to import water can be built with relative ease.

One thing that I have to question about this find is whether the water may be useful for drinking or cleaning given it's radioactivity.

It does make sense now given water that atomic energy \ batteries maybe used to drive turbines for energy to split radioactive water for hydrogen fuel.

Is the oxygen from split water still radioactive?

It looks like we still may have to ship all our human needed water with us.

Water radioactive or not would make a great barrier \ shield from solar radiation and micro meteorites.

....
A colony on the moon that doesn't need to import water can be built with relative ease.

One thing that I have to question about this find is whether the water may be useful for drinking or cleaning given it's radioactivity.

It does make sense now given water that atomic energy \ batteries maybe used to drive turbines for energy to split radioactive water for hydrogen fuel.

Is the oxygen from split water still radioactive?

It looks like we still may have to ship all our human needed water with us.

Water radioactive or not would make a great barrier \ shield from solar radiation and micro meteorites.

Why would it be radioactive?
Tritium has a half life of 12.5 years so it would be gone long before man evolved.
Unstable oxygen isotopes have very short sub minute half life. Long gone.
What process is creating these H2O with unstable atoms?

Another thing to consider is how much water is there and is it actually accessible.
If the concentration is very low then it might be impractical to mine it.....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The figure mentioned was around 350 milliliters (about 12 ounces) of water per cubic meter of lunar soil. A limited area of the Moon was examined . It was mentioned that the concentration of water was expected to be variable, and that it could be higher than this in other places.