More evidence of ice on the moon.It's too patchy to skate on, and the soil it's mixed with is likely to make it look like dirt, but the lunar ice The continuous bombardment of the Moon by comets and meteoroids have added some amount of water to the lunar surface. Energy from sunlight usually splits much of this water into its constituent elements hydrogen and oxygen, which generally escape to space. field suggested by data from the Clementine Clementine forty-niner’s drowned daughter; “lost and gone forever.” [Am. Music: Leach, 236] See : Grief spacecraft could serve as a major resource for space voyagers. An analysis of radar signals bounced off the moon during Clementine's 2-month visit in 1994 suggests that the ice field, located in a basin near the south pole, measures 5 to 10 meters thick and some 16,000 square kilometers in area. The field could serve as a filling station for craft en route to other locales in the solar system, providing an abundant source of hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. The notion that the moon contains water-ice dates to 1961, when researchers proposed that parts of the lunar surface in perpetual darkness would be cold enough to retain frozen water. In the late 1970s, scientists proposed that comets and asteroids This is a list of numbered minor planets, nearly all of them asteroids, in sequential order. As of late September 2007 there are 164,612 numbered minor planets, and many more not yet numbered. Most asteroids are ordinary and not particularly noteworthy. bombarding Bombarding is the process of 'pumping' a Cold Cathode Lighting tube (otherwise called Neon Signs). Information A detailed process of bombarding can be found here, Bombarding. the moon deliver a significant amount of water to the surface. These ideas came to the fore 2 years ago, when images taken by Clementine revealed a depression in the moon's South Pole-Aitken Basin The South Pole-Aitken basin is an impact crater on Earth's Moon. Roughly 2500 kilometers in diameter and 13 kilometers deep, it is the largest known impact crater not only on the Moon, but also in the entire solar system. that never receives sunlight (SN: 6/11/94, p. 383). Researchers recently analyzed radar data collected during the Clementine flight. The team concluded that only the region in perpetual darkness reflected the signals coherently, just as ice would. In contrast, a surface of ground-up rock, such as that of Mercury, Venus, and most of the moon, scatters radio waves Radio waves Electromagnetic energy of the frequency range corresponding to that used in radio communications, usually 10,000 cycles per second to 300 billion cycles per second. randomly in all directions. Although the study doesn't prove the case for ice, Paul D. Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute in Houston says he and his colleagues have no other explanation for their finding. They report their study in the Nov. 29 Science. Spudis adds that an instrument designed to measure hydrogen abundance, part of the Lunar Prospector mission scheduled for launch next October, should settle the question. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion