As you may have heard, NASA has been planning some return missions to the moon for various reasons - one of course is that ultimately NASA wants to have a manned mission to mars in the foreseeable future, and given the new technology developed since the original apollo missions, they think the moon might be a good staging ground for tests of readiness for their astronauts & equipment operating on another planetary body for a prolonged period of time.
Did you know, that they might also be going to the moon to look for the presence of water?
Some scientists speculated that some of the icy, water carrying comets that have impacted with Earth in history, may also have impacted on the moon. Unfortunately, given the lack of an atmosphere, any water on the surface of the moon would have burned away and evaporated by the sun. But, could have some of those comets buried themselves deep into the moon, hidden away in some of the craters?
In 1998 NASA sent the Lunar Prospector to check the moon using a neutron spectrometer to scan for hydrogen rich materials, hoping that a significant presence of hydrogen might be the H in H20. There were high concentrations found at both the North, and South poles of the moon.
Last month, NASA launched the LCROSS, another module designed to look for the presence of water on the moon. It was shot into space on June 18th - and will follow a sort of 'slingshot' elliptical orbit around our moon & the Earth to pick up speed before detaching and literally *throwing* it's booster module at an estimated 9000 km/h at the surface of the moon. This will create a huge plume of lunar material which will be thrown into space, that the LCROSS satellite will scan, using infrared spectrometers to determine the composition of the materials flying out into space, before the LCROSS satellite itself will impact with the moon.
The estimated impact will occur on Oct 9th of this year, at 11:30 UT - and the plume of lunar dust should be visible through an amateur telescope.
It's a waste of money mainly because there's no point of America going back to the moon. At this point in time we should be concerned only with being the first to Mar's. We could help Russia and China get back to the moon and give them some funding so that they share their findings with us. After that create an INTERNATIONAL moon base to assist the trip to Mar's all the while concentration OUR money on the methods we will use to get to Mar's.
It's a waste of money mainly because there's no point of America going back to the moon.
I wouldn't say that's true - there's a lot more we have to learn about the moon - above and beyond the back that it will assist in preparedness for the Mars mission (btw, no apostrophe in Mars). The technology that we have today far outstrips what they were using in the original Apollo missions; besides, if the moon does indeed have water & hydrogen, it provides quite the makeup for a first off-world colony, as they have fuel and water without having to spend.. I think the rate is like $15,000 just to bring a single 750ml bottle of water to the moon? That's pretty pricey.
We can't really say we've learned all we can learn about the moon when we've barely been there at all, and we still don't know even close to everything about the planet we're already living on.
Like I said let China and Russia spend the money, while we reap the benefits just, fund them a bit and give them some of our design plans and information. The moons just to much of a short term goal. But imagine colonizing it, total epicness.
Lol I guess I'm not the only one who saw that episode of Nova, but I gotta agree with HD, using the moon as a staging area will highly improve our chances of getting deeper into our solar system not mention it would help in the population management scenario, and at least we wouldn't be able to fuck up the atmosphere on the moon.
And what if China and Russia claim the resource rich areas of the moon? Technically we can't do shit if they decide that they want to make a colony and viola the moon is monopolized.
