Comet water on the moon

Check it out:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...om-comets.html
Volatiles present too. YES, we really do need a sample return
mission.
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets. If you accept
Darwins hypothesis of life originating in "some warm little pond" then
comets are the ideal "warm little ponds" when they come near the sun.
There are billions of them and they are rich in complex hydrocarbons,
almost like oilfields in space.
Compare the cost of a sample return mission from Mars and one from the
moon. If you intend to investigate possible biology, then comets are
just as likely as Mars to harbor life and this is a far easier mission
and would be a great way to develop a sampler for Mars.

Frogwatch wrote:
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets.

Since the comets spend around 99% of their orbits far from the Sun, how
exactly is life supposed to evolve on them or remain viable after
evolving when they are traveling in the frigid depths of space out
around Pluto?
Also, once they have made enough passes by the Sun for all of their
volatiles to boil off, what is any life on them then supposed to feed on?
As to the ones out in the Oort cloud, they never would get warm enough
for life to evolve.
High altitude aircraft collect micrometeorite dust all the time; as a
lot of micrometeors start as the remains of dead comets, and micrometeor
dust of very small size doesn't even heat up much on entering Earth's
atmosphere, those samples should have the hypothetical cometary
lifeforms on them.
They don't.
The idea was crazy when Hoyle and Wickramasinghe first proposed it and
started blaming flu outbreaks in British boarding schools on it, and
it's crazy now.

Pat

On Nov 20, 12:07�pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Frogwatch wrote:
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets.

Since the comets spend around 99% of their orbits far from the Sun, how
exactly is life supposed to evolve on them or remain viable after
evolving when they are traveling in the frigid depths of space out
around Pluto?
Also, once they have made enough passes by the Sun for all of their
volatiles to boil off, what is any life on them then supposed to feed on?
As to the ones out in the Oort cloud, they never would get warm enough
for life to evolve.
High altitude aircraft collect micrometeorite dust all the time; as a
lot of micrometeors start as the remains of dead comets, and micrometeor
dust of very small size doesn't even heat up much on entering Earth's
atmosphere, those samples should have the hypothetical cometary
lifeforms on them.
They don't.
The idea was crazy when Hoyle and Wickramasinghe first proposed it and
started blaming flu outbreaks in British boarding schools on it, and
it's crazy now.

Pat

best idea would ber to test samples on ISS during a long quiet time
between astronaut vists. pandemics that spread quickly across the
globe before air travel would indicate the possiblity of cometary
contamination.

this would be a worthwhile rover sample return mission to the moon

On Nov 20, 7:17*am, Frogwatch wrote:
Check it out:http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-in-lunar-impa...
Volatiles present too. *YES, we really do need a sample return
mission.
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets. *If you accept
Darwins hypothesis of life originating in "some warm little pond" then
comets are the ideal "warm little ponds" when they come near the sun.
There are billions of them and they are rich in complex hydrocarbons,
almost like oilfields in space.
Compare the cost of a sample return mission from Mars and one from the
moon. *If you intend to investigate possible biology, then comets are
just as likely as Mars to harbor life and this is a far easier mission
and would be a great way to develop a sampler for Mars.

Yes in deed, good old basalt bedrock has 50750 ppm of h2o. So what?
(there’s also loads of sodium and otherwise a good dozen other nifty
elements in basalt) Cosmic panspermia is a given, especially
interesting if it’s from Venus.

Seems our NASA LCROSS team is on serious steroids and/or hard drugs,
as in cover thy butt with all the media hype, spin and eyecandy meds
they can muster, or else. It’s called job security, except theirs is
with loads of nifty benefits and perks like COL insurance.

They must think our president/BHO and his staff of well educated
advisers are easily snookered and dumbfounded past the point of no
return. Because guess what folks, there’s always water to behold from
creating any crater on most any planet or moon, mostly because basalt
always has at the very least 50 ppm to begin with (750 ppm).
Secondly, keeping yourself warm is really not a problem, as is with
keeping yourself and whatever technology cool. For those polar crater
locations, Stirling energy conversions from that full spectrum of
solar photons converted into electrons is really going to become nifty
when there’s such a terrific thermal (light to dark) differential to
begin with.

Once any molecules of water/ice are freed at 3e-15 bar, it becomes
nearly explosive in how it would unavoidably react by expanding into
such an extreme vacuum, and there’s all sorts of secondary IR that
even manages to get into the deepest of those 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, not
to mention the moon itself is also radiating 22 mw/m2 of it’s
residual and/or thorium/uranium core heat (thicker polar crust has got
to be worth at least 10 mw/m2).

The 50750 some odd PPM of water that’s sealed in lunar surface
bedrock and deeper 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 carbon dust is not as likely to exist/coexist unless
that moon either isn’t very old, and/or there’s water or mineral brine
that’s still leaking/extruding out from a substantial geode reservoir
or layer protected aquifers inside the moon that’s otherwise being
sucked crystal dry by all of that 3e-15 bar vacuum.

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 review of
those original gamma spectrum readings. So, it remains pretty much
insider and/or need-to-know business as per usual, whereas raw/naked
ice in the extreme vacuum of space apparently doesn’t have to go by
any pesky laws of physics, or any 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 and those ppm of water to start off
with, and by taking roughly 11% of that as having been vaporized is
perhaps what our NASA has claimed as having given off measurable
water, that such frozen basalt by eights should have. I think the
impact 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, but then who’s
really counting since ordinary physics and easily peered replicated
science does not matter.

I would tend to favor that our physically dark lunar surface is about
as crystal dry anf electrostatic charged as things within such a
terrific vacuum environment could ever get, though I’ll give a very
remote possibility of there being an underground artisan cache of
water or mineral brine that has been gradually venting/leaking out and
into just those continually frozen craters 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 methods 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 mineral colors as having been enhanced on behalf of
honest observationology, similar to the nifty eyecandy that Hubble
gets published and accepted all the time.

Moon in color (natural but obviously saturation levels cranked up)
http://deepskycolors.com/pics/astro/..._MoonColor.jpg

From LRO UV fluorescence imaging, this amount of mineral hue
saturation as secondary reflectance should be at least ten fold better
yet, as well as a good thousand fold better resolution when obtained
from just 50 km. With their LRO extended dynamic range, any sign of
water vapor (atoms of h2o) as coming off such a naked surface of any
deep crater shadowed ice would have been unavoidably unmistakable. Of
course this means there really is not such raw/naked ice to behold,
but instead only vaporized basalt water.

So, apparently our NASA gets to lie their public funded butts off, and
the rest of us don't, because at roughly 100250 ppm of what's
supposedly accessible h2o within moon basalt, as such would have only
required vaporizing a few hundred tonnes of basalt in order to provide
those 25 gallons (94+ kg) of water. In other words, at 250 ppm it
would only require vaporizing 400 tonnes out of the 3.5e3 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 or hard to detect.

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%)"

Of course there’s lots of good old hydrogen released, and then helium
3 (3He at 10 ppb) that need not be wasted. In other words, for every
billion tonnes of vaporized basalt and surface deposits we get ten
tonnes and $25B worth of 3He.

“The energy content of 3He is: E(3He)= 2e8 kWh/kg-1 ... If Fusion is
the process of obtaining energy by adding things together” could be
interpreted as worth $2.5M/kg, especially as fossil duels are made
spendy or illegal to use unless their exhaust emissions are fully
certified as green, and average consumer cost of energy hits $0.25/
kwhr

A serious solar farm of mylar mirrors could vaporize lunar basalt
rather nicely, especially in that 3e-15 bar vacuum.

At perhaps as little as one kg per 100 m2 of mylar mirror shouldn't be
so unlikely. A full tonne of such deployed mirrors is thus offering
1e5 m2 of reflected and focused solar energy into a bedrock area of
perhaps 4 m2.

At only 90% efficiency is offering 3.4e6 w/m2, which at 3e-15 bar
should vaporize a hell of a lot of something. That collective 1e5 m2
of mylar mirror efficiency as focused down to 4 m2 should actually
become worth 3.6e6 w/m2. Even if each mirror assembly was worth 100
kg is a seriously dirt cheap alternative for utilizing solar energy,
whereas robotics accomplish most of that exposed physical and
technical process.

Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

On Nov 20, 9:07*am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Frogwatch wrote:
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets.

Since the comets spend around 99% of their orbits far from the Sun, how
exactly is life supposed to evolve on them or remain viable after
evolving when they are traveling in the frigid depths of space out
around Pluto?
Also, once they have made enough passes by the Sun for all of their
volatiles to boil off, what is any life on them then supposed to feed on?
As to the ones out in the Oort cloud, they never would get warm enough
for life to evolve.
High altitude aircraft collect micrometeorite dust all the time; as a
lot of micrometeors start as the remains of dead comets, and micrometeor
dust of very small size doesn't even heat up much on entering Earth's
atmosphere, those samples should have the hypothetical cometary
lifeforms on them.
They don't.
The idea was crazy when Hoyle and Wickramasinghe first proposed it and
started blaming flu outbreaks in British boarding schools on it, and
it's crazy now.

Pat

But the 19 month panspermia cycle is strictly Venus.

~ BG

On Nov 20, 12:48*pm, " wrote:
On Nov 20, 12:07 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:



Frogwatch wrote:
Now, the reason for a sample return mission is not simply to analyze
the chemicals but to investigate the possibility of Panspermia from
Comets, ie. primitive life being carried by comets.

Since the comets spend around 99% of their orbits far from the Sun, how
exactly is life supposed to evolve on them or remain viable after
evolving when they are traveling in the frigid depths of space out
around Pluto?
Also, once they have made enough passes by the Sun for all of their
volatiles to boil off, what is any life on them then supposed to feed on?
As to the ones out in the Oort cloud, they never would get warm enough
for life to evolve.
High altitude aircraft collect micrometeorite dust all the time; as a
lot of micrometeors start as the remains of dead comets, and micrometeor
dust of very small size doesn't even heat up much on entering Earth's
atmosphere, those samples should have the hypothetical cometary
lifeforms on them.
They don't.
The idea was crazy when Hoyle and Wickramasinghe first proposed it and
started blaming flu outbreaks in British boarding schools on it, and
it's crazy now.

Pat

best idea would ber to test samples on ISS during a long quiet time
between astronaut vists. pandemics that spread quickly across the
globe before air travel would indicate the possiblity of cometary
contamination.

this would be a worthwhile rover sample return mission to the moon

Yes, and robotics at 0.1% the cost of any manned mission is all that's
needed. The robo-bio-lab could remain on the moon (no sample return
necessary).

~ BG