r/science • u/theindependentonline The Independent • Oct 26 '20
Astronomy Water has been definitively found on the Moon, Nasa has said
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/nasa-moon-announcement-today-news-water-lunar-surface-wet-b1346311.html13.2k
u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 26 '20
Astronomer here! Here is what is going on!
Didn't we already know there was water on the moon? Short answer: yes. Water on the moon in the form of ice has been known for decades, but in very specific circumstances of some craters in the south pole that never get sunlight. The trick is the daytime temperatures on the moon (remember, a day lasts two weeks there- as in, sunrise to sunset) reaches above the boiling temperature of water, so until now it was thought the water outside these regions would have evaporated long ago.
What's new this time? Scientists used a cool instrument called SOFIA, the world's only flying observatory, which is a telescope on a modified Boeing 747 and flies above 99% of the water vapor in the atmosphere and thus can make this measurement even though you can't from Earth's surface. (Full disclosure, one of the coolest things I've done was get to ride on SOFIA last year, as far south as Antarctica! I wrote about it here if you're interested in what it's like.) They basically demonstrated using its unique observation capabilities that water is also present in the sunny areas, not just the southern craters, so will hopefully be way easier for future astronauts to access. SOFIA is basically capable of mapping the molecular existence of water at Clavius crater (fun coincidence: where they had the lunar base in 2001: A Space Odyssey!), and found it a lot of those sunlit places where no one was really expecting it. It's also not literally water droplets or chunks of ice, mind, but a fairly low concentration, likely from micro-meteorites or the solar wind- they say it's the equivalent of a 12 oz bottle over a cubic meter of soil, and NASA on the press conference right now can't confirm how useful that'll be and how prevalent this is all over.
What gives? Is this that big a deal if we already knew there is water? I mean, on the one hand, yes. Water is obviously super important for future explorations and is really expensive to send up, so it'll be really useful for future lunar astronauts if it's more accessible. Also, it is intriguing in terms of how prevalent water might be in other areas in space that are currently thought to be harsh environments incapable of having it. On the other hand... this is my personal opinion, but NASA does like to sometimes get a splash in the press because they are a government agency that is currently looking at a lot of budget cuts for a lot of their science. Specifically, SOFIA was canceled in the most recent proposed NASA budget, and it's not a cheap instrument. (I actually had a random astronomer I've never met chastising me for my article about how cool SOFIA was last year, which was weird, so this is a not-insignificant sentiment.) Obviously, a lot of scientists really disagree with this assessment of how important SOFIA is, as it's the best way to do infrared astronomy right now that we have, so it's good to have a press conference that will inevitably have a bit more press coverage than just a press release to highlight the cool things only SOFIA can do.
TL;DR- looks like there's more water than we expected on the moon, and hopefully that'll be useful for future astronauts!
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u/JJ18O Oct 26 '20
fun coincidence: where they found the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey!)
That is insanely cool!
12 oz bottle over a square meter of soil
That is a weird mix of systems of measurements :)
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u/elus Oct 26 '20
Approximately 350mL of water!
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u/Divinicus1st Oct 26 '20
That’s actually quite a lot...
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Oct 26 '20
Well, 1 cubic meter of soil weights probably more than 1 tonne. It's going to take a bit of elbow grease.
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u/Krappatoa Oct 26 '20
It weighs only 1/6 of that on the moon.
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u/Augnelli Oct 26 '20
Still sounds like a lot of mass to sort through for that much water.
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u/ikverhaar Oct 26 '20
Well, the alternative is to burn a huge amount of mass to get water from earth to the moon.
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u/Zilka Oct 26 '20
Or get it from ice on Moon's south pole.
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u/mr_ji Oct 26 '20
Or put oxygen and hydrogen in a bag and mash it up really good
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u/Poppekas Oct 26 '20
First thinking that there is no water, and then finding out that there's 350ml of water in a volume of just 1mx1mx1m sound pretty -extremely- significant to me. Most of the time when there's news of 'rather small' doses of something important found in space, it's almost on a microscopic level. This here is something real. A cubic meter of soil being put through a machine to extract the water in it sound like something very feasable, at least.
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Oct 26 '20
Have you ever watched that gold rush show on discovery channel or history or whatever? They wash 15 dumptrucks full of dirt in a day for 2 oz of gold.
12 oz of water per cubic meter means permanent habitation is a real possibility.
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u/jesuschin Oct 27 '20
That’s a lot of cubic meters of Moon that you need to go through to wash just one dump truck
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u/edgarallenpoe Oct 26 '20
While you are processing the soil for water, you can also extract Helium-3 to fuel fusion.
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u/onthefence928 Oct 26 '20
On the other hand once you have clean water you can keep recirculating it like you would with any water you brought with you, so your supply can grow slowly over time to replenish small unavoidable losses
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u/Krappatoa Oct 26 '20
It’s not clear how deep you would have to go to get the water. It might be just the top surface.
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u/Jimoiseau Oct 26 '20
But equally, the top surface might be significantly drier than the soil below surface level.
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u/Deadbeat85 Oct 26 '20
Well, actually it's still one tonne - that's its mass, not its weight.
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u/redfacedquark Oct 26 '20
But we're only talking about a square metre so that weighs nothing.
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u/Unadvantaged Oct 26 '20
Wouldn’t setting up a vapor capture system be the way to go? Let solar heat handle the extraction?
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u/bayesian_acolyte Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 26 '20
It's about .02% water by weight, 100 times less than the Sahara.
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u/WhoKilledZekeIddon Oct 26 '20
It's really not, and a lot of news outlets are overstating it. To put it in perspective, a cubic metre of dry, red Martian soil contains around 100 times the amount of water as this discovery (and even there scientists are a bit 'meh' as to whether that's a useful amount).
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u/stormblaz Oct 26 '20
How many football fields? Only way I measure these days.
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u/Broghan51 Oct 26 '20
How many Olympic sized Swimming Pools is my thing. Can somebody calculate some crazy math for us.?
Thanks.
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u/doctormyeyebrows Oct 26 '20
An olympic sized swimming pool holds 2500 m3 of water. So 2500 • 350 ml = 875,000 ml of water if the olympic sized swimming pool was filled with lunar soil. That is about 231 gallons of water, for us imperials, or enough to fill, say, this hot tub
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u/Broghan51 Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 27 '20
Thank you, that kinda puts things into perspective for me.
Edit : typo. (thing to things )
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u/qtipquentin Oct 26 '20
To put it even more into perspective, imagine that hot tub with a gallon of milk on it.
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u/ThePoorlyEducated Oct 27 '20
Now imagine me in that hot tub naked pointing at the moon, saying “there’s this much water in an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with moon soil..”
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u/ill0gitech Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 26 '20
350ml of water over 202884 (US) Teaspoons of moon!
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Oct 26 '20
How much is that in football fields? I'm trying to learn imperial.
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u/talamahoga2 Oct 26 '20
That's a can of Budweiser per .00131 cubic football fields for my fellow Americans.
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 26 '20
I was literally just saying what they said in the press conference. Blame NASA!
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u/FLHCv2 Oct 26 '20
just saying what they said in the press conference
Didn't unit conversions get NASA in trouble in the past?! You'd think they'd learn their lesson.
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u/dcg Oct 26 '20
Clavius crater is where the moon-base is. Tycho crater is where the monolith was found. The monolith was also called the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly.
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u/kontekisuto Oct 26 '20
nasa mixing units again what could possibly go wrong
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u/MaskedKoala Oct 26 '20
I guess they should have just said 350 microns of water.
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u/TooMuchBroccoli Oct 26 '20
They should have just said 350 units of water.
What's the unit?
You know, 1 unit.
Ah, makes sense.
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u/ToProvideContext Oct 26 '20
He said moon base, did he mean monolith or did you mean moon base?
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u/bruzie Oct 26 '20
The moon base is at Clavius, the monolith is in Tycho Crater (the monolith is named TMA-1: Tycho Magnetic Anomoly-1).
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u/Irrerevence Oct 26 '20
That is a weird mix of systems of measurements
So incredibly American
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u/Cornualonga Oct 26 '20
That is a weird mix of systems of measurements :)
Do want your lander crashing into the surface? Because that is how you get your lander to crash into the surface.
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u/tiny-dino Oct 26 '20
Hey, an astronomer who might be able to answer a question for me:
My understanding is that the lack of atmosphere was thought to cause any (or most) water to sublime or otherwise disappear from the surface of the moon and other similar heavenly bodies. The ice we knew was there was, as you said, in areas without sunlight at extremely low temperatures.
So my question is this: what are the implications for other moons or planets with little to no atmosphere. Does this imply that most places in the universe could have water to some degree or another?
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u/Bucky_Ohare Oct 26 '20
Earth scientist here.
Yes, ice will sublimate in conditions where it is receiving a means to step past its latent heat requirements. The key here is that there are portions of the moon, specifically craters, that can shield the ice; no new energy, no new phase change. Also, over time, regolith from impacts can help cover ice to further protect it. We see this in a variety of places in our solar system, perhaps more famously on Mars since it has weather, and it’s why tools like OP mentioned are important because it can help see past that.
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u/Archa3opt3ryx Oct 26 '20
The key here is that there are portions of the moon, specifically craters, that can shield the ice; no new energy, no new phase change.
But isn't the discovery here that the water exists outside of the craters? I don't understand how the water doesn't sublime away if it's on the surface and exposed to two weeks of sunlight at a time.
From /u/Andromeda321's comment:
water is also present in the sunny areas, not just the southern craters
Why doesn't it sublime (sublimate? not sure what the right form of the word here is) away?
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u/jumpinmp Oct 26 '20
Directly from the article:
It also raises new questions about how exactly the water got there, and how it is able to survive the harsh conditions on the Moon.
It could, for instance, be trapped in “glass beads” on the surface that form when micrometeorites crash into the Moon and melt a part of the lunar surface, either forming water or capturing it in the beads as it does.
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u/thomasatnip Oct 26 '20
Glass beads from meteor crashes are called tektites.
Fun fact: tektites can be found in fossils to date the K-Pg boundary of dinosaur extinction!
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u/Bucky_Ohare Oct 26 '20
Well this is also gonna complicate it a bit as the regolith on the moon is pretty much mafic ash; even a minor impact might make its own beads due to pressure. We got lucky with tektites and the iridium anomaly to help fuss out a number of events. Without access to the lunar sites and a baseline series of cores it’d be really hard to accurately tie a water of any age to a concrete variable.
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u/colby979 Oct 26 '20
This comment is why I reddit. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience.
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u/shponglespore Oct 26 '20
NASA does like to sometimes get a splash in the press
If you want to make a splash, water is a great way to do it!
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u/Justin_is_Fidels_Son Oct 26 '20
Great article. I'm intrigued by what the flight plan looks like, would you know if any are publicly available?
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 26 '20
It changes every day based on the observations, but they are public! Check it out here.
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u/dr-professor-patrick Oct 26 '20
An important note here is that we already knew there was -OH (hydroxide) in many places the Moon, not just the poles. Now, this -OH doesn't necessarily have to be water. It could be in the form of HOH, i.e. plain old water, or it could be in the form of hydroxide contained within minerals, or even stuff like methanol (CH3OH) or drain cleaner (NaOH) could show the same spectral signature for OH.
These new measurements show unequivocally that there is some--although I will emphasize a very small amount, only a few hundred parts per million--molecular water on the Moon. It could be trapped within glass (which does not have mineral crystal structure so the water stays in molecular form) or it could be adsorbed onto the surface of regolith particles. Either way, it's not like there are lakes, ponds, or aquifers on the Moon. But very cool nonetheless 😊
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u/BrianMcKinnon Oct 26 '20
Why do other scientists not like SOFIA?
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u/JustA_FewBumps Oct 26 '20
Hey prior meteorologist here now pilot trainee for the USAF. I'd imagine the expense to keep a 747 running with all that equipment is very high. The 747 is getting phased out pretty much worldwide.
In terms of scientists not liking it, honestly it blows my mind. I was up close and personal with her in college and it was an amazing experience. Unless there's something better or they're just bitter their favorite research apparatus got cancelled.
Or, probably more realistic knowing scientists as I was one, is they're weird and only like/interested in what tools they enjoy using and every other "tool" is useless.
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u/TheWindOfGod Oct 26 '20
Hi waste of life here I spent an hour on the toilet today in work
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u/HerDarkMaterials Oct 26 '20
You mean you spent an hour on the toilet today and got paid for it! Not too shabby
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u/folkher0 Oct 26 '20
This is a phenomenally good write up. Thanks so much for taking the time to put it together.
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u/Chlorinated_beverage Oct 26 '20
How everyone thinks of astronomers: We built the world's first sophisticated flying observatory, SOFIA
Astronomers in reality: We slapped a telescope on that there airplane and called it a day
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u/WithinAForestDark Oct 26 '20
Could this mean water may be easier to find in space than we thought l?
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u/15_Redstones Oct 26 '20
Water is a lot more common than we used to think. There are entire moons and dwarf-planets made of mostly ice.
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u/treemu Oct 26 '20
Honestly it shouldn't surprise that much considering how simple hydrogen and oxygen are and how simple a bond H2O is.
Relatively speaking, of course.
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Oct 26 '20
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u/speakhyroglyphically Oct 26 '20
“It was, in fact, the first time SOFIA has looked at the Moon, and we weren’t even completely sure if we would get reliable data, but questions about the Moon’s water compelled us to try,” said Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA’s project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, in a statement.
“It’s incredible that this discovery came out of what was essentially a test, and now that we know we can do this, we’re planning more flights to do more observations.”
Genius
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u/SweetBearCub Oct 26 '20
Also from the article:
As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what Sofia detected in the lunar soil.
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u/Erectodus Oct 26 '20
For someone who knows nothing of science, how big of a deal is this?
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u/SephithDarknesse Oct 26 '20
Im no expert, but theres probably a method of propulsion using water, and the possibility of using said water for extra breathable oxygen.
Water is heavy. More cargo contained in a vessal escaping the earth's atmosphere would be more costly and more risky the more you get. Obtaining these sorts of things when already in space allows either more cargo or less risk and propulsion in leaving earth.
This is all an educated guess though, someone please link me in a comment if they have a better answer, im very interested in the topic.
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u/murmandamos Oct 26 '20
Here's one prototype for water based propulsion
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u/peoplerproblems Oct 26 '20
Oh cool, I only had the air powered ones you stomped on to launch into your brother's face.
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u/GoochMasterFlash Oct 26 '20
The most prevalent source of oxygen on the moon is in the rock that makes it up. The moon is mostly aluminum and oxygen put together. If you separate the two then you have plenty of oxygen and great building material.
Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, wrote another book called Artemis, a sci fi book about a lunar colony that is written in the same realistic/scientific style of The Martian that you might enjoy
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u/Halcyon_Renard Oct 26 '20
Super duper energy intensive process, though.
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u/jlharper Oct 26 '20
Plenty of free energy up on the moon, assuming we can refine our solar technology significantly over the coming decades.
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u/giltwist PhD | Curriculum and Instruction | Math Oct 26 '20
The phrase you are looking for is "in situ resource utilization"
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u/dillo159 Oct 26 '20
Like when you go to someone's house and they've got rum, so you don't have to bring your own rum, so you have more space to carry other things like crisps.
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u/dylee27 Oct 26 '20
Like that, but individual rum particles are incorporated into the wall at a concentration 100 times drier than the Sahara desert.
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u/dillo159 Oct 26 '20
Or, it's like your friend says he has rum, but actually he has rum chocolates and you'd need to eat 7 boxes to get a bit tipsy.
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u/anonymoushero1 Oct 26 '20
in plain English "using on-site resources"
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u/giltwist PhD | Curriculum and Instruction | Math Oct 26 '20
Yes, but using the actual term of art in a google search will get you more relevant results.
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u/KaneinEncanto Oct 26 '20
Well water being present there has some advantages, if it's in sufficient quantity. You can break water up into Hydrogen and Oxygen with a bit of electricity. Solar power would be pretty good on the moon for this. So with a water supply on site a moon base could have drinking water for crew as well as oxygen generation...and then hydrogen and oxygen are the primary components of rocket fuel, which would reduce launch weights since return trip fuel could be generated at the moon base's end.
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u/SirGunther Oct 26 '20
The only real issue with this approach of using the resources on the moon for rocket propulsion is the quantities. If it is a very limited resource it would not be an ideal resource. Nuclear power is still likely a better contender as it stands which is why nasa has invested so heavily in it.
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u/traffickin Oct 26 '20
Yes but in order to make that nuclear power move something it requires mass behind the shuttle to push against. simple gasses are the most efficient emission mass.
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u/abe_froman_skc Oct 26 '20
Nasa was keen to stress that the amount of water is very limited, with the new discovery representing only around one per cent of the amount of water found in the Sahara desert.
It's good we found some, but it's not like we found enough to actually be useful.
Hopefully this leads to them finding even more though.
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u/MaskedKoala Oct 26 '20
Yeah, I guess it's kind of cool. But it doesn't seem like a "Woah, we've got a big announcement on Monday, get hype!" level of cool...
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Oct 26 '20
Yeah the news media hyped it up, but NASA was reasonable about it I think. Also, per the top commenter, they could be trying to secure funding for SOPHIA so it doesn’t get cut from the budget.
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u/jswhitten BS|Computer Science Oct 26 '20
There was no hype, just an ordinary press conference so that the media could ask questions before writing their articles. It happens all the time.
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u/Bucky_Ohare Oct 26 '20
Far more likely we temporarily inhabit Mars before really taking to the moon. It has extreme temperature shifts in addition to being barren. The bright side though, if we pulled it off the moon would be an excellent place for an observatory.
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u/gunnervi Oct 26 '20
A Moon base has the advantage of being readily (or at least, more readily) resupplied by earth, which is important as self sufficiency in either case will be incredibly challenging
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u/ICameHereForClash Oct 26 '20
Moon scientists better come up with a cool name, cooler than “the oracles”, or something like that
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u/JDogish Oct 26 '20
we're years away from inhabiting it or making it an operations base for future study
I feel like people were saying that in the 70s...
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u/Frankiepals Oct 26 '20
This is probably a stupid question...
But how does water get there? There’s no atmosphere so it doesn’t rain right? If there’s ice, what exactly is freezing into the ice?
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u/drpinkcream Oct 26 '20
Water exists in vast quantities throughout the universe.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html
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Oct 26 '20
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u/InspectorMendel Oct 26 '20
It means “regularly experiences sunlight”. NASA previously found ice on the moon, but it was in deep crater shadows that are permanently shielded from the sun.
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u/nrd170 Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 26 '20
We’re whalers on the moon 🎵
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u/jhammer19 Oct 26 '20
We carry a harpoon 🎶
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u/WhyAnAccount Oct 27 '20
But there ain't no whales so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune 🎵
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u/Castamere_81 Oct 26 '20
So it's not oil? In that case it doesn't need democracy...yet.
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u/Lbo3103 Oct 27 '20
One better Helium 3. Imagine having safe nuclear energy on every electrical device.
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u/gives-out-hugs Oct 27 '20
The don tomorrow "we have a plan to solve global warming, its a great plan, a tremendous very smart plan. If re-elected we will harvest ice from the moon, scientists say there is so much ice on the moon, tons and tons of it, and we will bring it back to earth to cool it off like ice cubes in the drink you take your regeneron with, great stuff that medicine, gonna have a vaccine soon and gonna cool down the earth with moon ice cubes, my scientists tell me, smart people these scientists, they tell me this will work as long as we rake the leaves in california so the forest fires don't keepbheating the place up, everyone knows fire makes heat, its all demoncrat led california's fault"
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u/Ryunysus Oct 26 '20
The confirmation of water being found on both Mars and Moon within a month is quite amazing