Article] Radon leaks could reveal water on Mars

[Followups set to sci.astro and alt.sci.planetary]

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 12:00:40 +0000, The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
In sci.physics, Lucius Chiaraviglio wrote
on Wed, 13 Aug 2003 06:01:48 GMT
:
The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
[. . .]
The only other possibility is mining moonrock for mass propellant
and/or rocket fuel, and one problem with that is that it's not
clear to me that there's an oxidizer up there.

Oxygen. Plenty of it, although hard to get loose from the rock.

Interesting.

Finding hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen might be more of a problem, although
if the polar lunar ice deposits turn out to be real, that would help with
at least the hydrogen part.

Hydrogen may not be as big of a problem as one might think although
I can't say for sure since all I've read so far is a blurb.
However, apparently the solar wind has embedded itself in the
rocks of the Moon; most of that is protons and electrons, which
suggests that it is now hydrogen.

This could be right (or maybe this is already established from lunar
samples returned by Apollo? Were these handled in a way that permitted
this determination?). Mining ice would be less work than processing a
load of rock for adsorbed or implanted gases (for that matter, also less
work than trying to extract oxygen out of silicate and oxide minerals; I
wonder if extracting oxygen out of silicate and oxide minerals turns out
to be more work than processing the huge amount of regolith you would need
to get the implanted/adsorbed oxygen?). On the other hand, solar wind
implantation might also help significantly with providing carbon and
nitrogen. Again on the other hand, though, the polar crater ice might
turn out to have carbon and nitrogen compounds in it (unlikely to have
methane or ammonia, but might have more complex compounds vapor-deposited
from UV-irradiated comets and/or carbonaceous chondrite asteroid impacts).

--
Lucius Chiaraviglio
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