In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOpXMJdZGHc
describing the discovery of water on the moon a few months ago, “There’s a whole lot more beyond the water. So that’s the exciting part in my mind, it’s not only about the water now, there’s a whole lot more that we’re going to be talking about in the comming months”
What could possibly be more exciting than more water than expected on the moon? Have I missed these announcements? I tried searching but haven’t come up with anything.
Sky&Telescope has an article about this in their Feb issue.
Note that this article was written a while back, probably in November, so they may have better results now.
Thanks for the article. As I suspected, that stuff is not as exciting as the discovery of water, IMO.
Well, I can see how some are excited about the ethanol…
… it can be used as a rocket fuel, you know.
Water is all the hell over the place in space, and in fact may be the most common constituent of sub-planetary solid bodies. It would really be more surprising not to find any trace of water at all on the surface of the Moon than to find water there. On the other hand, finding spontaneously generated organic molecules, while hardly unanticipated, tends to indicate that such molecules–the precursors to amino acids, which are the building blocks and catalysts for proteins, which are vital for anything we would consider life–is highly interesting.
I like water and all–after all, you and I and everyone we know are mostly water with a few contaminants–but it really is the contaminants that differentiate us from water balloons and clouds.
Stranger
The reason I thought the water being on the moon was exciting was because from my understanding, the moon had been thought to be a barren dry rock and sand landscape until this discovery? (I could be wrong).
dtilque: Ethanol is interesting, but I doubt that it would be easy or economical if it was found in such small concentrations to be useful for full production of rocket fuel…and also, we can make rocketfuel just filtering the martian atmosphere, so it is perfectly possible to go to mars without the need for a moonbase…
Yes, there was no water at all in any of the Luna samples returned by Apollo, so most of the moon was thought to be completely dry.
My comments about ethanol were somewhat facetious. It will not burn by itself, but would need an oxidizer (ideally liquid oxygen) to burn in a rocket. It’s actually interesting to scientists because organic compounds are even less likely than water to be on the moon. As Strange notes above, water is one of the most common compounds in the universe. Ditto for CO[sub]2[/sub] and carbon monoxide. Complex organic molecules are much rarer.
What we really need is some kind of sample return from one of those polar craters to see what actually there.
I can see it now… the giant black pillar showed up, the sun was rising to beating drums as the orchestra kicked in… and the nascent lifeform was blown up by a NASA probe. 
So my hope of finding a polar sea of tetrahydrocannabinol on the moon is not dead! 
Even easier, why no rover on the moon with a lab onboard like the one at Mars, but optimized for looking for moon-likely things? We have been too dumb for 30 years or more to do this because Russia put a good robot on the moon that lasted even thru the nights there, drove long distances, and was completely ignored by USA. I think it would be admitting they had the best idea for exploration, that is why they won’t do it. Best in the science and in the cost anyway. We could send an already built rover now, and no one even proposes it?
There’s an already-built moon rover readily available?
Sure, there are plenty prototypes and even some almost done ones from the Mars missions that could be used with some change in instruments, and no dust storms to worry about, they could explore a long time. Russia had several that came right back to life after the next sunrise, and here we are 30-40 years later not doing it???
The actual rover is a small piece of the project though. You still need a delivery system, including a safe landing method; parachutes won’t work too well on the moon.
Did you forget, our very first Surveyor number 1, landed perfectly on the moon in the 60’s, so I think we have always had that capability to land instruments, right from first time. Remember if we can run something with a 40 minute delay to Mars we sure ought to be great at it with just a 2 second delay. We could land the thing live in real time by naked eye using just radar and live TV if we so wanted.
Yeah, but the Mars rovers used parachutes. I was just saying that retrofitting an existing Mars probe to land on the moon would require a lot of work. They’re not just laying around ready to be used. :dubious:
That was a beautiful comment. Honestly, I’ll remember it.