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Moon/Mars water
Water on the Moon? e'yup.
These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as
viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-
1 spacecraft. On the left is an image showing brightness at shorter infrared wavelengths. On the right,
the distribution of water-rich minerals (light blue) is shown around a small crater. Both water- and hydroxyl-rich
materials were found to be associated with material ejected from the crater.
Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.
Link...
and mid-latitude ice on Mars. Interesting is that it's looking like Viking came within 3.5" of discovering it back in the 70's - they didn't dig deep enough.
The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took
this image of a new, 8-meter (26-foot)-diameter meteorite impact
crater in the topographically flat, dark plains within Vastitas Borealis,
Mars, on November 1, 2008. The crater was made sometime after
Jan. 26, 2008. Bright water ice was excavated by, and now surrounds,
the crater. This entire image is 50 meters (164 feet) across.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Link....
These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as
viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-
1 spacecraft. On the left is an image showing brightness at shorter infrared wavelengths. On the right,
the distribution of water-rich minerals (light blue) is shown around a small crater. Both water- and hydroxyl-rich
materials were found to be associated with material ejected from the crater.
Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.
Link...
Moon Water: A Game-Changing Discovery
The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.
Three spacecraft picked up the signature of water, not just in the frigid polar craters where it has long been suspected to exist, but all over the lunar surface, which was previously thought to be bone dry.
"Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the moon," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the studies detailing the findings.
While the findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, don't mean there are pools of liquid water sitting on the moon, it does mean that there is — entirely unexpectedly — water potentially tied up or mixed in the minerals that make up the lunar dirt.
"What we're detecting is completely unexpected," Pieters said. "The moon continues to surprise us."
The moon dirt would be akin to soil from an arid environment like Arizona — it wouldn't feel wet to the touch, but there's certainly water bound up in it, Pieters told SPACE.com.
This discovery may well revolutionize our understanding of the nature of the moon's surface, experts say, and it has geologists eager to go back to the moon and dig up some lunar dirt.
"I rank this as a game changer for lunar science," said University of Colorado astrophysicist Jack Burns, chair of the science committee for the NASA Advisory Council. Burns was not involved in the new findings. "In my mind this is possibly the most significant discovery about the moon since the Apollo era."
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The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.
Three spacecraft picked up the signature of water, not just in the frigid polar craters where it has long been suspected to exist, but all over the lunar surface, which was previously thought to be bone dry.
"Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the moon," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the studies detailing the findings.
While the findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, don't mean there are pools of liquid water sitting on the moon, it does mean that there is — entirely unexpectedly — water potentially tied up or mixed in the minerals that make up the lunar dirt.
"What we're detecting is completely unexpected," Pieters said. "The moon continues to surprise us."
The moon dirt would be akin to soil from an arid environment like Arizona — it wouldn't feel wet to the touch, but there's certainly water bound up in it, Pieters told SPACE.com.
This discovery may well revolutionize our understanding of the nature of the moon's surface, experts say, and it has geologists eager to go back to the moon and dig up some lunar dirt.
"I rank this as a game changer for lunar science," said University of Colorado astrophysicist Jack Burns, chair of the science committee for the NASA Advisory Council. Burns was not involved in the new findings. "In my mind this is possibly the most significant discovery about the moon since the Apollo era."
>
The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took
this image of a new, 8-meter (26-foot)-diameter meteorite impact
crater in the topographically flat, dark plains within Vastitas Borealis,
Mars, on November 1, 2008. The crater was made sometime after
Jan. 26, 2008. Bright water ice was excavated by, and now surrounds,
the crater. This entire image is 50 meters (164 feet) across.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Link....
Craters gouged into the ruddy Martian terrain have revealed subsurface water ice closer to the red planet's equator than would be expected, new orbiter images show.
The ice also seems to be 99 percent pure, instead of the dirty dust and ice mixture some scientists expected to see, scientists said today.
And while numerous surface features on Mars suggest that water once flowed on the red planet in the past, the new discovery - detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science - adds to the evidence that has been piling up in recent years that water exists on present-day Mars, in the form of subsurface ice. It also gives scientists a way to further probe the Martian surface for signs of water ice.
"We were able to conclude that this ice is a relic of a previously wetter climate," said research team member Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona in a Thursday teleconference.
Because water is essential to life as we know it, any findings of potentially once-liquid water has implications for the search for evidence of possible past Martian life.
The new observations indicate the presence of vast sheets of ice buried beneath the Martian surface left over from when the planet's ice caps covered more of the planet, researchers said. They ice averages about a meter thick and contains about the same amount of frozen water as the Greenland ice sheet on Earth, science team member Ken Edgett added.
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The ice also seems to be 99 percent pure, instead of the dirty dust and ice mixture some scientists expected to see, scientists said today.
And while numerous surface features on Mars suggest that water once flowed on the red planet in the past, the new discovery - detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science - adds to the evidence that has been piling up in recent years that water exists on present-day Mars, in the form of subsurface ice. It also gives scientists a way to further probe the Martian surface for signs of water ice.
"We were able to conclude that this ice is a relic of a previously wetter climate," said research team member Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona in a Thursday teleconference.
Because water is essential to life as we know it, any findings of potentially once-liquid water has implications for the search for evidence of possible past Martian life.
The new observations indicate the presence of vast sheets of ice buried beneath the Martian surface left over from when the planet's ice caps covered more of the planet, researchers said. They ice averages about a meter thick and contains about the same amount of frozen water as the Greenland ice sheet on Earth, science team member Ken Edgett added.
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