Moon Offers Up the Manna of Water
“This really appears to have changed the rules of the game,” said Robin Canup, astrophysicist and director of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who was not part of the team that made the discovery. “The assumption has been that the moon is dry.”
At one time, finding water in space was major endeavour, with millions of dollars being spent to find it. Today money is still being spent on Mars and other planets for similar resources as on Earth, with the irony of water being found today located in the earlier Apollo moon samples that had been brought back to the Apollo astronauts. This discovery is forcing scientists to rethink about the lunar, past and future, but I personally wonder why. Searching for water on Mars has cost millions when all the time it has been right under our noses close by. Of course, more money is to be spent on figuring out how much water exists and whether or not it could be extracted for usage during
Catching the scientific community off guard this week in the NATURE journal article, apparently water was found inside volcanic glass beads, representing solidified magma from the early moon’s interior. With the previous assumptions that the moon has always been dry, it has always pushed space exploration to search for other planets whereas now the search could focus more at home—which has recently been the goal of our governmental offices anyway.
The only reason mankind has assumed that water did not exist on the Moon is because of its violent birth about 4.5 billion years ago with the theory that some type of planet the size of mars smashed into Earth, tearing off molten pieces which formed into the Moon. The leading scientists felt that any water that had been present in the developing lunar body would have been vaporized, being lost into space. Now that water has been found out of nowhere, maybe the theory of the Moon’s existence needs to be rethought also.
“If there was a lot of water in the early moon, then that is new for sure,” said Ben Bussey, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who also was not involved in the new study. “People will have to think about that when they think about how the moon evolved.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 6:41 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
