More Water on the Moon

If the moon could talk, I can only imagine it would be screaming back at earth...

What are you waiting for!!

LOL

How are picture of the moon has changed!

Too bad we won't be going there for at least two generations.

Good. Maybe now with a budget for actual ISRU tech development we can see if it's possible to extract it.

Do to comet impacts, there may be a great deal subsurface water on the moon waiting to be discovered in addition to the water in the dark craters.

1.3 million pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice

Errr, oh dear on NASA and metric conversions. Which is it, 1.3 million pounds = 6,000 metric tons, or 600 million metric tons = 1.3 x 10^12 (!) lbs?

Oh yeesh, now I'm doing iit - 1.3 million points = 600 metric tons. Quite a lot less snow than used to help us here in Vancouver with our Olympic snowboard track.

1mT=2,200#

I look forward to seeing the in-space technology demonstrations of in-situ resource utilization called for in the new budget; with the new plans it's now much more likely for us to sustainably settle the Moon and live off of lunar resources like polar ice deposits. The old Constellation plans scrapped all of that.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf

CessnaDriver and Mike Hilton, are you deliberately misrepresenting NASA's new plans, or have you just not bothered to read them?

Warp,

The correct amount of water ice is 608 million metric tons, at 2200 pounds per metric ton.

Whatever that works out to be in Imperial (1320 trillion pounds, I think). Anyway, a lot.

By the way, I didn't do that calculation -- somebody in PAO did.

FWIW

Yup, indeed, the new budget brings ISRU to the front, whereas CxP had deleted it (and effectively moved any resources for it into the late 2040s/early 2050s). That's a big part of trying to make all exploration sustainable, which is the entire point of the new vision (and the original VSE).

Thanks Paul, I suspected so. Would be nice if PAO used the science-derived numbers and put the conversions for the metric-impaired in the parentheses, if using them at all!

"are you deliberately misrepresenting NASA's new plans, or have you just not bothered to read them?"

Yes, I've read it and stand by my assertion that under the Obama/Bolden/Garver "plan" we will not be going BEO in HSF for at least two generations. While we will be spending an huge amount of money on studies and education it will amount to nothing as have the same exercises of the past 45+ years. Besides, what makes you think they are going to properly fund this endeavor?

You can believe the fluff from the political hacks if you want to....I don't because history has shown otherwise.

LOL more water in the solar system. It used to be bone dry! What would 1975 NASA tell Obama to do with such knowledge? Extend the shuttle, do apollo again, or something else?

Gee you think the moon just might be a logical next step for HSF?
Wow! Water! Good thing we already have a moon based HSF program in place......
Oh damn. Never mind. We just cancelled it.

But don't worry. Just as soon as we turn NASA into a hobby shop and identify some "game changing technologies" and "cross cutting capabilities" we'll be ready to do uh something, I mean go uh somewhere, with uh some kind of spacecraft or something.

Oh wait, I forgot. All that cool new technology is to go to Mars. In a couple of weeks. Yeah that's it. Never mind that the Moon is only three days away. Now. With water. 240,000 miles vs at least 36,000,000 miles.

Oh yeah. Silly me. We've been to the Moon already. 12 guys. A couple of days each. 6 landing sites. We're done! Finished!

Time to disband our most experienced HSF workers and turn our attention to those who have never launched anybody anywhere. Time to party like it's 1959.

Brilliant!

> it will amount to nothing as have the same exercises of the past 45+ years. Besides, what makes you think they are going to properly fund this endeavor?

How does that make sense to you? A completely new budget will do the same things as before? A budget that demands no more increases won't be funded?

This is all opposite of Constellation and you think it will be the same? How do you think this?

I'm just wandering, LRO has been up there a while and made passes over both the north and south pole regions numerous times (way into double digits by now)with the LROC,LEND and Diviner instruments collecting data. Why are we looking at data from already defunct lunar probe? No Offense to India that program was a great success for its space program and country. However,with all due respect to India LRO is a far superior machine. Although they seem as stingy with their data as the LRO team does.Its just food for thought. Wheres the data?

Mike Hilton said it well.

Others who have said it in their ways as well...

Cernan,Schmitt,Cunningham,Duke,Carpenter,Borman,Jones,Hickam,Gibson,Rutan, and a long list of others that are not buying into this, many of them in congress.

The plan is fatal, it will kill meaningful exploration HSF for a very long time, assuming by some miracle it passed in full and Obama was re-elected to carry it through.

It won't pass as is, and Obama may very well be in the ex-Presidents club in three years, certainly a less empowered POTUS by next January.

MICHAEL
That is the worse idea I've ever heard in my life, Tom.

SAMIR
Yes, yes, it's horrible…this idea….

There is no usable water on the moon.

600 tons, over this entire area, is a minuscule amount, in very low concentration, and in an extremely hostile environment.

From a scientific point of view, it is interesting.

From an exploration point of view, it is irrelevant. It is cheaper to bring it from Earth.

I'm not entirely sure what LRO being a superior machine has to do with very much, but least we worry about "falling behind in the moon race" or any other such nonsense, rest easy: the mini-SAR from which the press release paper is derived was a NASA instrument. Phew, I can feel the national ego relaxing and exhaling... :)

The issue is that it takes some time for proper analysis (especially for anything other than geological interpretation of images), and then after that, there is a desire to release verifiable information via a peer-review format rather than the scientifically-dreaded "science by press release." Given the mission got there in late-2008 and operated until Aug-2009, getting a paper out in early 2010 is actually very fast.

Just a thought - is this proof of the 'lunar snow' theory that I saw on this very site at the time of LCROSS?

IIRC, the idea was that the lunar polar ice may be from two distinct sources - some from cometary impacts, yes. However, some also from the generation of hydroxyls also revealed by Chandrayaan-1. This then migrates to the poles and settles out. If this theory is borne out, then lunar ice is... wait for it... self-regenerating! Naturally, the time-scale for the process is, as yet unknown unless someone has published a paper on the theory and I don't know about it.

@ Fred Sanford,

I don't want to sound like I'm wearing a tin-foil hat but consider this: Lunar return has been postponed #at least in terms of planning# for a decade. However, if NASA were to come forward and say that LRO has confirmed Chandrayaan-1's findings, there would be massive pressure for a quick human lunar return. Worse, it would make the President, Dr. Holden and Administrator Bolden all look like idiots for suggesting postponing it.

Politics is everything. It even puts embargoes on revealing scientific discoveries. What a pity the Indians weren't parties to that.

I do hope that Congress hears of this. It will make the next meeting with Administrator Bolden about the Holden/Garver plan... interesting.

Does anyone know what the density distribution is of this? i.e., would we be able to extract significant quantities of it without strip-mining large areas? If that's so, it may still be more economical to bring the water from Earth until there's more infrastructure available.

Granted, even if strip-mining is the case, we could probably use the same technology for helium-3...

@ madscientist I'm not some chest pounding American patriot. I was simply stating the data should be better with better instruments. This isn't your grandma's lunar prospector ,the data is received alot faster and isn't in the same raw form it was in back then. So no they know the scientific data almost instantly,they just choose not to share it.

I have been told this by several people working at university of Arizona on the LROC team. They are told what to show and not show the general public.Why? Who knows man the government does what they want and I sit on my hands and wait like every other tax payer.

As a reminder... Solar energy can be used to convert water into the most efficient chemical propellant mix known through a simple process known as electrolysis. The big deal about lunar water is the potential to use it to displace the need to bring massive quantities of propellants from the Earth into space.

The Constellation program would have put in place an architecture that couldn't make very good (economic) use of lunar water or other space resources. It's replacement, which includes orbital depots, can. The new plan -- whether one likes it or not -- is a plan that intends to make space exploration beyond LEO more affordable.

That was also part of the Vision for Space Exploration before it was hijacked in favor of the "Constellation Implementation".

To be sure, the new plan delays sending humans beyond LEO. But by making investments in technologies and systems that make space exploration more economical, it enables a more robust, affordable human space exploration program.

And if money can be made by extracting water from the Moon, it enables commercial investments as well.

All of this is why I favor the new plan over the cancelled plan.

"There would be massive pressure for a quick lunar return". What planet are you living on? Massive pressure? from whom? There was a lunar return program going on for six years and I bet you 90 percent of the public never heard of it, and those who did couldn't care less. The public never clammored for juicing up Constellation. This ain't 1969 my friends.

You are correct. How many hundreds or thousands of square miles/kilometers are these craters spread over. At approximately 8.35 pounds per gallon this is only 155,688 gallons of water. I would bet that if someone did an analysis it would be far cheaper to just transport that much water to the lunar surface instead of transporting all of the mining equipment, purification equipment and lunar surface transportation infrastructure necessary for human utilization.

Just because something is doable doesn't mean its cost effective.

It isn't 1969 no.
But the public wasn't clammoring to cancel Cosnstellation for crying out loud.

These days, it's more what people are against then for when it comes to peoples concerns with what government is up to.

You are correct.

No, you and Crazy Eddie are both wrong. The correct amount of water found at the lunar north pole by Mini-SAR is 608 MILLION metric tons, not 600 metric tons. The earlier number was a mistake put on the NASA web site by PAO. In english units, the amount of water is over 1000 TRILLION pounds.

I'll leave the conversion of mass to gallons of water to you two.

OK, I have doubled checked the math on the english units.

There are 608,000,000 metric tonnes of water at the north pole of the Moon. One metric tonne is 2200 pounds. After the math, that means the 1.3 TRILLION metric tonnes are at the pole. I was off by 3 orders of magnitude.

Here are some numbers to consider. One Space Shuttle launch uses 735 metric tonnes of LOX/LH2 (735,000 kg). If we took all the water ice seen by Mini-SAR and converted it to rocket propellant, it would be enough propellant to launch one Space Shuttle equivalent, PER DAY, for over 2200 years.

So is it worth considering utilizing lunar polar water?

1.3 TRILLION metric tonnes

1.3 TRILLION pounds. I'll get it right, eventually.

Yes, 608 million tonnes is 1.34 trillion pounds.
That's equivalent to a puddle that's 278 km diameter by 1 cm deep.

Depending on what area that water actually covered, and how deep into the regolith, it still sounds like hard work to get it. The percentage water content would be interesting to know. For that we need a scoop-and-distill rover, with really good batteries or a long extension cord.

That's equivalent to a puddle that's 278 km diameter by 1 cm deep.

Well, there's a factoid whose obscurity is exceeded only by its irrelevancy.

The ice we're seeing is nearly pure and is located within the interiors of craters with diameters of 2-15 km. It's at least a couple meters thick, with maybe 50 cm of dry regolith on top of it.

To a mining engineer, it's almost the perfect ore body.

Hey, nice to meet you, and thanks for the slam. I was trying to understand the scale of things, so I made up a strawman/ benchmark case with very little information to base it on. (Shallow layer, as has been discussed here earlier; area much smaller than the moon's radius.) The information without the slam would have worked great for me.

Do all of those dimensions come from the paper? Where's the paper?

Okay, please check my math:

Using Spudis' clarification that the estimate is 608x10^6 metric tons, I get about 1.60x10^11 gallons.

Or 160,000,000,000 gallons.

The comment that we need to consider economics is correct of course. The economic question becomes: What is the cost per kg to extract lunar water? And how does it compare to the cost of the alternative, which for a lunar base would be to bring water from the Earth to the Moon?

If we think of extracted lunar water as displacing what we would otherwise have to transport from the Earth, and assuming that it costs $100,000 per kg (or $100M/mT) -- possibly a low value -- to transport anything from the Earth to the Moon, the approximate value (or, the potential avoidance cost) of the *identified* lunar water resource is about $6.08x10^16.

Or $61,000,000,000,000,000. ($61 quadrillion dollars)

In Earth orbit, the calculated value would be based on the cost of transporting mass from the Earth to orbit, or about $10,000 per kg. Which shifts the potential value down to more like $6,100,000,000,000 ($61 quadrillion dollars).

Does anyone have an argument that a kg of hardware can't extract at least 10 kg of water per year? If it only does that, we have a pretty big savings, don't we? Frankly, this strikes me as a pretty simple metric to evaluate.

In addition to all that, keep in mind that there's no reason to think that we've found all of the water. Plus, we also know that we can use solar energy to make a lot more oxygen than that from just the lunar dust. So there are a lot of additional possibilities out there once we become good at mining lunar resources.

So, did I get my mathemathics correct?

Papa,

Sorry to be so abrupt -- it's been a long couple of days for me.

There is much about the polar deposits that we don't know. Two points about the ice we see with radar. First, if it contains a significant admixture of soil or rock, the radar will see it as soil and rock. The exact amount of contaminant needed to suppress the CPR enhancement is not known. But our suspicion is that the high CPR craters we see contain mostly ice, possibly broken up into blocks (it is still exposed to impact bombardment), but pure. Second, the confinement of this material to crater interiors suggests that it is concentrated and in mining terms, that's a good thing. If this material exists as lenses of ice a couple of meters thick, it is very easy to scoop up and process.

But I readily admit that we do not know the detailed physical state of the ice, nor what other materials it may be found with. Clearly, a small robotic mission (with rover) is needed to explore, sample, analyze and map the deposits before resource processing decisions are made.

@RC

This is all opposite of Constellation and you think it will be the same? How do you think this?

Simple, what part of "history" (politics, past funding, failed programs, the Rogers and Augustine Commissions) don't you understand.

Well, if the pro-private folks who have been posting on this board are at all serious, they should admit that this discovery is very exciting. The only way HSF becomes attractive from an economic point of view is if there are resources we can reach with (relative) ease and exploit. A year ago there was some theoretical notion that there might be water at the poles, but many people were scoffing at the possibility. Now we have proof. And there may be more water up there for all we know. And perhaps other yet to be discovered resources? We won't know until we go back. One thing seems clear -- just because the Moon is our nearest neighbor and we've been there a few times, we shouldn't assume that we thoroughly understand it. We only scratched the surface -- literally. There is still plenty of lunar exploration still to be done, in my humble opinion.

"If we took all the water ice seen by Mini-SAR and converted it to rocket propellant, it would be enough propellant to launch one Space Shuttle equivalent, PER DAY, for over 2200 years.

"So is it worth considering utilizing lunar polar water? "

Yes, but not as propellent. There is certainly enough there for life support and doing things like growing hydroponic crops, if stringent enough closed-loop recycling is implimented. Okay, so there is no miraculous lunar hydrolox fuel, but just being able to eventually support a crew with reduced imports from Earth is a goal worth aiming for.

FWIW, I have always been opposed to using lunar water for 'throw away' applications like propellent production. I never thought that there was really a large enough quantity or that it was generated quickly enough to allow for such an application.

Ben the Space Brit said: "I have always been opposed to using lunar water for 'throw away' applications like propellent production. I never thought that there was really a large enough quantity or that it was generated quickly enough to allow for such an application."

Clearly, there appears to be enough water to use some as propellant. However, I have similar sentiments. If we're going to set up a mining settlement on the Moon, we're going to need water and a lot of other elements/compounds.

As I noted before, water is worth more in terms of avoidance cost on the Moon than in Earth orbit. And, although the NASA tech development program has been severely underfunded over the last few years, they have shown that oxygen can be produced from lunar dust using solar heat and electricity. This means that we can produce all of the lunar oxygen that we might possibly want to export. And since hydrogen is the lowest mass fraction of an H2-O2 propellant mix, we can much more easily afford to send H2 from the Earth than the entire H2-O2 mix. We might even bring up the hydrogen as part of a liquid methane (CH4)or liquid ammonia (NH3) mix.

Nitrogen and carbon will also be valuable on the Moon.

Bringing terrestrial hydrogen and lunar oxygen together at an orbiting propellant depot might be the best architectural choice, all things considered.

Does anyone have an argument that a kg of hardware can't extract at least 10 kg of water per year?
Yeah, depending on where you're digging. It's gotta depend on (a) access to power and (b) mass of regolith per kg of water. At the lunar equator, I think they've found trace amounts of water, but the regolith/water ratio sucks. There seem to be high concentrations of water in polar craters, so the ratio is maybe workable. But it's probably in permanent shadow, so digging would require extra power infrastructure (solar collectors and "extension cords" of some sort).

If pspudis is right, the polar ice is in blocks covered by a blanket of regolith -- the best case. The worst case is uniformly interspersed, like dirty snow beside the road. I think pspudis is saying we have well-reasoned hunches, but we need in situ data.