On Nov 13, 7:10*pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:
The Associated Press: Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water
"Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water,
scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of
hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed
barren and inhospitable."http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g_WHHFPrQjvdnQhVIvx...
Our NASA LCROSS team is on serious drugs, as in cover thy butt with
all the hype and spin meds they can muster, or else. They must think
BHO is easily snookered and dumbfounded past the point of no return.
Because guess what folks, there’s water to behold from creating any
crater, mostly because basalt always has at least 50 ppm to begin with
(750 ppm). Secondly, keeping yourself warm is not a problem, as is
with keeping yourself and whatever technology cool. For those polar
locations, Stirling energy conversions from photons to electrons is
really going to become nifty when there’s such a terrific thermal
differential to begin with.
Once any molecules of water are freed at 3e-15 bar, it becomes nearly
explosive in how it would unavoidably react to such extreme vacuum,
and there’s all sorts of secondary IR that even manages to get into
the deepest of polar craters from time to time, contributing
sufficient thermal energy to boil off or rather sublime most any raw/
naked volume of ice at that extensive vacuum.
The 50750 some odd PPM of water that’s sealed in surface and crust
basalt is one thing that’s likely sure enough there to behold.
However, raw/naked ice under a crystal dry layer of physically dark
dust is not as likely to exist/coexist unless that moon either isn’t
very old, and/or there’s water that’s still leaking out from a
substantial reservoir or aquifer inside the moon.
AP / “The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that's only
what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete
said.”
And yet there’s still no UV florescence imaging or public view of
those original gamma spectrum readings. So, it’s still pretty much
insider and/or need-to-know business as per usual, whereas raw/naked
ice in the vacuum of space apparently doesn’t have to go by any pesky
laws of physics or need of independent peer review.
The LCROSS 20 meter crater is basically giving up 1e3 m3 worth of
displaced and/or partially vaporized basalt that’s mineral saturated
and supposedly containing 250 PPM water. That’s roughly 3.5e3 tonnes
worth of lunar basalt w/minerals to start off with, and by taking a
little over 11% of that as having been vaporized is perhaps what our
NASA has claimed as having given off measurable water that such frozen
basalt should have. I think it vaporized closer to 25% if not as
great as 33%, which means the h2o content of that basalt wasn’t as
great as 100 PPM.
I would favor that our moon is about as dry as things get, though I’ll
give a very remote possibility of there being an underground artisan
cache of water that has been gradually leaking out and into just that
continually frozen crater, is at least technically possible, although
it's extremely unlikely those unavoidable h2o vapors weren't easily
detected by astronomers and their various sensitive spectrometry as of
at least decades ago.
Here's yet another image of the sorts of crystal dry minerals that our
moon has to offer. These hue saturations are not bogus/false colors,
just the original colors as having been enhanced, similar to the nifty
eyecandy that Hubble gets published and accepted all the time.
Moon in color (natural but obviously cranked up)
http://deepskycolors.com/pics/astro/..._MoonColor.jpg
In LRO UV fluorescence imaging, this amount of mineral hue secondary
reflectance should be at least ten fold better yet, and a good
thousand fold better resolution when obtained from just 50 km. Any
sign of water vapor as coming off such a naked surface of crater
shadowed ice would have been unavoidably unmistakable.
So, apparently our NASA gets to lie, and we don't, because at roughly
100250 ppm of what's supposedly h2o within moon basalt, as such it
would have only required vaporizing a few hundred tonnes of basalt in
order to provide 25 gallons (94+ kg) of water. In other words, at 250
ppm it would only require vaporizing 400 tonnes of basalt in order to
release 100 kg of its water, along with releasing at the very least
1000 kg of sodium (though many areas of the lunar surface are rich or
saturated in sodium to the tune of 50,000 ppm), plus there's many kg
worth of other minerals and of course there's 30,000100,000 ppm O2 =
1240t that shouldn't have been all that unexpected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt
Basalt generally has a composition of 45–55 wt% SiO2, 2–6 wt% total
alkalis, 0.5–2.0 wt% TiO2, 5–14 wt% FeO and 14 wt% or more Al2O3.
Contents of CaO are commonly near 10 wt%, those of MgO commonly
in the range 5 to 12 wt%.
High alumina basalts have aluminium contents of 17–19 wt% Al2O3;
boninites have magnesium contents of up to 15% MgO. Rare
feldspathoid-
rich mafic rocks, akin to alkali basalts, may have Na2O + K2O
contents
of 12% or more.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1995/95JE00503.shtml
"Calculation of oxygen yield (as released by hydrogen gas reduction
of ilmenite) show that (1) beneficiated basalt will provide the most
oxygen (8–10%)"
~ BG