Cidersomerset
22nd March 2014, 20:38
There was great excitement a few months ago about moon bases , mining etc
Now its all gone a bit low key and now doubts about all the water they predicted
may be there. Jade Rabbit broke down a couple months ago and we have not heard much since.
vQO6oyc95Os
Published on 27 Jan 2014
January 27, 2014 BBC News
======================================================
http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/2.60.1/desktop/3.5/img/blq-blocks_grey_alpha.png
22 March 2014 Last updated at 14:50
Doubt cast on evidence for wet Moon By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website, The Woodlands, Texas
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/73745000/jpg/_73745150_c0196196-partial_lunar_eclipse-spl.jpg
Moon
Continue reading the main story
Related Stories
'Much more water' in Moon's rocks
Ice deposits found at Moon's pole
'Significant' water found on Moon
Scientists have cast doubt on a major part of the case for the Moon having once held
abundant water.A US team studied a mineral called apatite, which is found in a variety
of lunar rock types.Apatite, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning deceit, may
have misled scientists into thinking the Moon is wetter that it actually is.Lead author
Jeremy Boyce said: "We thought we had a great indicator, but it turns out it's not that
reliable."Initial analysis of the lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions,
suggested the Moon was "bone dry".
University of New Mexico
But in the last decade, studies of volcanic glasses and apatite in lunar rocks have
revealed them to be hydrogen-rich, building a compelling case for significant water
having been present on the Moon as different minerals crystallised from the cooling
magma.Dr Boyce, a Nasa Early Career Fellow at the University of California, Los
Angeles, presented his results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in
The Woodlands, Texas, this week. The work has also just been published in the
prestigious journal Science.The UCLA geochemist, along with collaborators Francis
McCubbin, Steve Tomlinson, James Greenwood and Allan Treiman, simulated the
formation of apatite minerals containing different amounts of volatile elements -
hydrogen, chlorine and fluorine.
They demonstrated that it was possible to start with any water composition in the
magma and by varying only the degree of crystallisation and the chlorine content,
reproduce all the features seen in a diverse range of apatite from the Moon.
Apollo 17 Back where we started? Analysis of Apollo mission samples suggested the
Moon was dry, but that view shifted in the last decade "We used to think it was a simple
proportionality, that the more hydrogen was in the apatite, the more hydrogen in the
magma," Dr Boyce explained.
"Then we figured out… that it's a competition between hydrogen and mostly fluorine.
Fluorine is the element that apatite most wants."
To illustrate the complex chemical process involved in the formation of lunar apatite, Dr
Boyce used a dating analogy, in which fluorine is apatite's ideal partner and the two pair
up preferentially. Chlorine is also attractive to apatite, but not quite as much fluorine.
Continue reading the main story
Lunar water: A brief timeline
Early 1970s - Trace amounts of water found in rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts,
but it is assumed to be contamination from Earth
1978 - Soviet scientists claim to detect water in samples returned to Earth by the
robotic Luna 24 spacecraft
1994 - Results from the US military's Clementine probe's radar instrument suggest
the presence of water-ice at the Moon's south pole
2008 - American scientists detect water in beads of volcanic glass from Apollo samples
2009 - Data from India's Chandrayaan spacecraft suggest the presence of hydrogen
over large parts of the Moon's surface
2010-2011 - Studies by Boyce, McCubbin, Greenwood, Erik Hauri and others detect up
to thousands of parts per million of water in apatite and lunar melt inclusions
He continued: "Then the last apatite comes and there's nothing left but hydrogen. So it
says: 'Okay, want to go out'?
"So all the apatites are taking all the fluorine and hiding it from the melt. Then the melt
forgets that it had all that fluorine and the apatites get more chlorine-rich and more
hydrogen-rich." In this way, apatite may have produced a misleading indication of the
original abundance of water in the Moon's interior.
The abundance of water in lunar rocks has important implications for the prevailing
theory of the Moon's formation - known as the Giant Impact Model. According to the
theory, several billion years ago, a planet-sized object called Theia collided with Earth,
blasting rock into Earth orbit.
This material then coalesced to form the Moon. But this fiery origin story requires that
volatile elements were boiled off, leaving the Moon depleted of water relative to Earth.
So a less watery Moon ties in better with this theory.
The result generates new uncertainty about how much water the Moon started with.
And the researchers point out that other sources of hydrogen, such as the solar wind,
could have been incorporated into the apatite - further complicating the picture.
Dr Francis McCubbin, senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico, who's a
co-author on the new study, told the BBC: "There is some hydrogen that's coming in
from the solar wind and getting stuck on the surface. But there is some amount -
definitely seems to be less than on Earth - that the Moon started with."
But what's also notable is that some of the authors of this study previously published
some of the papers that built the case for a watery Moon.
Apatite The calcium-rich mineral apatite is found in a wide variety of lunar samples
"Clearly, we did the best we could at the time. But that's the progress of science - there
are course corrections," Dr Boyce explained.
"Definitely, there is still water on the Moon. Those rocks are not completely anhydrous.
There's a really interesting record of heavy chlorine and hydrogen isotopes. But the
abundances, we've demonstrated, are difficult to interpret."
Dr McCubbin commented: "Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts built a building and
the elevator was on a floor where [the water abundance] was one (ppb) part per billion.
"We took it up to where we were near terrestrial abundances, and then we realised we
were on the wrong floor. We've taken it back down, but not all the way down to where
we were 40 years ago."
Dr Everett Gibson, from Nasa's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, who was not
involved with the research, told BBC News he found the results eminently plausible.
He said the scant evidence for hydrated minerals in lunar rocks had always been a
problem for models of a water-rich Moon.
"The worry is, everything we measure is being modified and concentrated in a way that
makes it impossible to get back to where it started," explained Dr Boyce.
Dr McCubbin commented: "Apatite's name comes from the Greek word 'apat',
meaning 'deceit'. And this is the last time we're going to let it trick us."
The latest results represent a personal landmark for Dr Boyce, who was hospitalised in
2012 with a viral infection and spent several weeks in a coma. The researcher had to
learn to walk again afterwards.
"We're celebrating as only scientists celebrate, by publishing papers and getting back
into our normal lives," he explained.
Jeremy Boyce said that he, Francis McCubbin and James Greenwood of Wesleyan
University, had been publishing papers on lunar apatite at the same time and could
have spent the rest of their careers as scientific rivals.However, the three scientists
subsequently formed an alliance at a scientific meeting, deciding to collaborate, rather
than compete, on the problem.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter
More on This Story
Related Stories'Much more water' in Moon's rocks 14 JUNE 2010, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
Ice deposits found at Moon's pole 02 MARCH 2010, SCI/TECH
'Significant' water found on Moon 13 NOVEMBER 2009, SCI/TECH
Spacecraft see 'damp' Moon soils 24 SEPTEMBER 2009, SCI/TECH
Moon's interior 'did hold water' 09 JULY 2008, SCI/TECH
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26696856
=======================================================
NATURE international weekly journal of science...
Nature | News
China's Moon rover awake but immobile
Yutu rover resumes taking data but is still hampered by mechanical failure.
Alexandra Witze
19 March 2014
http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.16274.1395255842!/image/1.14906.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/1.14906.jpg
Xinhua/Photoshot
China's Yutu rover moved between 100-110 metres before stalling in late January.
China’s Moon rover Yutu, or ‘Jade Rabbit’, has stopped hopping. But its ears are still
twitching — and communicating with Earth.
Last week Yutu and its companion spacecraft, the Chang’e 3 Moon lander, awoke from a
period of dormancy after the frigid, two-week lunar night — the third awakening since
landing on 14 December, Chinese scientists said this week at the Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The probes continue to gather data and
send it back to Earth.
But Yutu may never move more than the 100–110 metres it has already travelled from
its landing site — in the Mare Imbrium. Mission officials had hoped that Yutu would
travel to the rim of a nearby crater and explore it, but a mechanical failure in Yutu’s
drive system has stilled the rover since late January.
The rover has already used its ground-penetrating radar to probe the structure of the
lunar soil more than 100 metres deep. Those data are still being processed, but Le Qiao,
a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, is anxious to see
whether the results confirm the thickness of basaltic rocks at the landing site. Using
satellite images of craters that expose the underlying layer, Qiao’s team estimates that
the basaltic rocks are 41–46 metres thick at the landing site.
Early results from the rover’s alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer also hint at the
chemical composition of the landing site. A presentation led by scientists at the Institute
of High Energy Physics in Beijing showed that the instrument analysed the chemical
makeup of lunar soil at two locations. It spotted expected major chemical elements such
as magnesium, aluminium, silicon, potassium and calcium.
Much of the purpose of having a rover is lost, though, if Yutu can no longer gather data
from different areas.
Scientists were hoping to see more of the Chinese lunar data at the conference, says
Alexander Basilevsky, a lunar geologist at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and
Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. “They should have something by now,” he says.
Basilevsky is comparing the geology of Yutu’s landing site to a site about 500 kilometres
away, where the Soviet Lunokhod-1 rover travelled in 1970. Comparing the two could
show how widespread different rock types are in the region, he says.
Even if Yutu never moves again, it and the Chang’e 3 lander will keep taking data. And
Chinese officials have already talked about Chang’e 4, a mission similar to Chang’e 3
that will launch to a different part of the Moon next year.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14906
http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-moon-rover-awake-but-immobile-1.14906
Now its all gone a bit low key and now doubts about all the water they predicted
may be there. Jade Rabbit broke down a couple months ago and we have not heard much since.
vQO6oyc95Os
Published on 27 Jan 2014
January 27, 2014 BBC News
======================================================
http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/2.60.1/desktop/3.5/img/blq-blocks_grey_alpha.png
22 March 2014 Last updated at 14:50
Doubt cast on evidence for wet Moon By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website, The Woodlands, Texas
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/73745000/jpg/_73745150_c0196196-partial_lunar_eclipse-spl.jpg
Moon
Continue reading the main story
Related Stories
'Much more water' in Moon's rocks
Ice deposits found at Moon's pole
'Significant' water found on Moon
Scientists have cast doubt on a major part of the case for the Moon having once held
abundant water.A US team studied a mineral called apatite, which is found in a variety
of lunar rock types.Apatite, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning deceit, may
have misled scientists into thinking the Moon is wetter that it actually is.Lead author
Jeremy Boyce said: "We thought we had a great indicator, but it turns out it's not that
reliable."Initial analysis of the lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions,
suggested the Moon was "bone dry".
University of New Mexico
But in the last decade, studies of volcanic glasses and apatite in lunar rocks have
revealed them to be hydrogen-rich, building a compelling case for significant water
having been present on the Moon as different minerals crystallised from the cooling
magma.Dr Boyce, a Nasa Early Career Fellow at the University of California, Los
Angeles, presented his results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in
The Woodlands, Texas, this week. The work has also just been published in the
prestigious journal Science.The UCLA geochemist, along with collaborators Francis
McCubbin, Steve Tomlinson, James Greenwood and Allan Treiman, simulated the
formation of apatite minerals containing different amounts of volatile elements -
hydrogen, chlorine and fluorine.
They demonstrated that it was possible to start with any water composition in the
magma and by varying only the degree of crystallisation and the chlorine content,
reproduce all the features seen in a diverse range of apatite from the Moon.
Apollo 17 Back where we started? Analysis of Apollo mission samples suggested the
Moon was dry, but that view shifted in the last decade "We used to think it was a simple
proportionality, that the more hydrogen was in the apatite, the more hydrogen in the
magma," Dr Boyce explained.
"Then we figured out… that it's a competition between hydrogen and mostly fluorine.
Fluorine is the element that apatite most wants."
To illustrate the complex chemical process involved in the formation of lunar apatite, Dr
Boyce used a dating analogy, in which fluorine is apatite's ideal partner and the two pair
up preferentially. Chlorine is also attractive to apatite, but not quite as much fluorine.
Continue reading the main story
Lunar water: A brief timeline
Early 1970s - Trace amounts of water found in rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts,
but it is assumed to be contamination from Earth
1978 - Soviet scientists claim to detect water in samples returned to Earth by the
robotic Luna 24 spacecraft
1994 - Results from the US military's Clementine probe's radar instrument suggest
the presence of water-ice at the Moon's south pole
2008 - American scientists detect water in beads of volcanic glass from Apollo samples
2009 - Data from India's Chandrayaan spacecraft suggest the presence of hydrogen
over large parts of the Moon's surface
2010-2011 - Studies by Boyce, McCubbin, Greenwood, Erik Hauri and others detect up
to thousands of parts per million of water in apatite and lunar melt inclusions
He continued: "Then the last apatite comes and there's nothing left but hydrogen. So it
says: 'Okay, want to go out'?
"So all the apatites are taking all the fluorine and hiding it from the melt. Then the melt
forgets that it had all that fluorine and the apatites get more chlorine-rich and more
hydrogen-rich." In this way, apatite may have produced a misleading indication of the
original abundance of water in the Moon's interior.
The abundance of water in lunar rocks has important implications for the prevailing
theory of the Moon's formation - known as the Giant Impact Model. According to the
theory, several billion years ago, a planet-sized object called Theia collided with Earth,
blasting rock into Earth orbit.
This material then coalesced to form the Moon. But this fiery origin story requires that
volatile elements were boiled off, leaving the Moon depleted of water relative to Earth.
So a less watery Moon ties in better with this theory.
The result generates new uncertainty about how much water the Moon started with.
And the researchers point out that other sources of hydrogen, such as the solar wind,
could have been incorporated into the apatite - further complicating the picture.
Dr Francis McCubbin, senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico, who's a
co-author on the new study, told the BBC: "There is some hydrogen that's coming in
from the solar wind and getting stuck on the surface. But there is some amount -
definitely seems to be less than on Earth - that the Moon started with."
But what's also notable is that some of the authors of this study previously published
some of the papers that built the case for a watery Moon.
Apatite The calcium-rich mineral apatite is found in a wide variety of lunar samples
"Clearly, we did the best we could at the time. But that's the progress of science - there
are course corrections," Dr Boyce explained.
"Definitely, there is still water on the Moon. Those rocks are not completely anhydrous.
There's a really interesting record of heavy chlorine and hydrogen isotopes. But the
abundances, we've demonstrated, are difficult to interpret."
Dr McCubbin commented: "Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts built a building and
the elevator was on a floor where [the water abundance] was one (ppb) part per billion.
"We took it up to where we were near terrestrial abundances, and then we realised we
were on the wrong floor. We've taken it back down, but not all the way down to where
we were 40 years ago."
Dr Everett Gibson, from Nasa's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, who was not
involved with the research, told BBC News he found the results eminently plausible.
He said the scant evidence for hydrated minerals in lunar rocks had always been a
problem for models of a water-rich Moon.
"The worry is, everything we measure is being modified and concentrated in a way that
makes it impossible to get back to where it started," explained Dr Boyce.
Dr McCubbin commented: "Apatite's name comes from the Greek word 'apat',
meaning 'deceit'. And this is the last time we're going to let it trick us."
The latest results represent a personal landmark for Dr Boyce, who was hospitalised in
2012 with a viral infection and spent several weeks in a coma. The researcher had to
learn to walk again afterwards.
"We're celebrating as only scientists celebrate, by publishing papers and getting back
into our normal lives," he explained.
Jeremy Boyce said that he, Francis McCubbin and James Greenwood of Wesleyan
University, had been publishing papers on lunar apatite at the same time and could
have spent the rest of their careers as scientific rivals.However, the three scientists
subsequently formed an alliance at a scientific meeting, deciding to collaborate, rather
than compete, on the problem.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter
Related Stories'Much more water' in Moon's rocks 14 JUNE 2010, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
Ice deposits found at Moon's pole 02 MARCH 2010, SCI/TECH
'Significant' water found on Moon 13 NOVEMBER 2009, SCI/TECH
Spacecraft see 'damp' Moon soils 24 SEPTEMBER 2009, SCI/TECH
Moon's interior 'did hold water' 09 JULY 2008, SCI/TECH
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26696856
=======================================================
NATURE international weekly journal of science...
Nature | News
China's Moon rover awake but immobile
Yutu rover resumes taking data but is still hampered by mechanical failure.
Alexandra Witze
19 March 2014
http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.16274.1395255842!/image/1.14906.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/1.14906.jpg
Xinhua/Photoshot
China's Yutu rover moved between 100-110 metres before stalling in late January.
China’s Moon rover Yutu, or ‘Jade Rabbit’, has stopped hopping. But its ears are still
twitching — and communicating with Earth.
Last week Yutu and its companion spacecraft, the Chang’e 3 Moon lander, awoke from a
period of dormancy after the frigid, two-week lunar night — the third awakening since
landing on 14 December, Chinese scientists said this week at the Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The probes continue to gather data and
send it back to Earth.
But Yutu may never move more than the 100–110 metres it has already travelled from
its landing site — in the Mare Imbrium. Mission officials had hoped that Yutu would
travel to the rim of a nearby crater and explore it, but a mechanical failure in Yutu’s
drive system has stilled the rover since late January.
The rover has already used its ground-penetrating radar to probe the structure of the
lunar soil more than 100 metres deep. Those data are still being processed, but Le Qiao,
a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, is anxious to see
whether the results confirm the thickness of basaltic rocks at the landing site. Using
satellite images of craters that expose the underlying layer, Qiao’s team estimates that
the basaltic rocks are 41–46 metres thick at the landing site.
Early results from the rover’s alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer also hint at the
chemical composition of the landing site. A presentation led by scientists at the Institute
of High Energy Physics in Beijing showed that the instrument analysed the chemical
makeup of lunar soil at two locations. It spotted expected major chemical elements such
as magnesium, aluminium, silicon, potassium and calcium.
Much of the purpose of having a rover is lost, though, if Yutu can no longer gather data
from different areas.
Scientists were hoping to see more of the Chinese lunar data at the conference, says
Alexander Basilevsky, a lunar geologist at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and
Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. “They should have something by now,” he says.
Basilevsky is comparing the geology of Yutu’s landing site to a site about 500 kilometres
away, where the Soviet Lunokhod-1 rover travelled in 1970. Comparing the two could
show how widespread different rock types are in the region, he says.
Even if Yutu never moves again, it and the Chang’e 3 lander will keep taking data. And
Chinese officials have already talked about Chang’e 4, a mission similar to Chang’e 3
that will launch to a different part of the Moon next year.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14906
http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-moon-rover-awake-but-immobile-1.14906