'Significant Amount' of Water Found on Moon

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer

posted: 13 November 2009 12:16 p.m. ET

It's official: There's water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA's LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount," Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Those signs were visible in the data from spectrographic measurements (which measure light absorbed at different wavelengths, revealing different compounds) of the Centaur stage crater and the two-part debris plume the impact created. The signature of water was seen in both infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements.

"We see evidence for the water in two instruments," Colaprete said. "And that's what makes us really confident in our findings right now."

How much?

Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments - the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets - in the area of the impact crater (about 80 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.

"I'm pretty impressed by the amount of water we saw in our little 20-meter crater," Colaprete said.

"What's really exciting is we've only hit one spot. It's kind of like when you're drilling for oil. Once you find it one place, there's a greater chance you'll find more nearby," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

This water finding doesn't mean that the moon is wet by Earth's standards, but is likely wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth, Colaprete said. And even this small amount is valuable to possible future missions, said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters.

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India's now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn't the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

"There's a lot of stuff in there," Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn't yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

More questions

The findings show that "the lunar poles are sort of record keepers" of lunar history and solar system history because these permanently-shadowed regions are very cold "and that means that they tend to trap and keep things that encounter them," said Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. "So they have a story to tell about the history of the moon and the solar system climate."

"This is ice that's potentially been there for billions of years," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator at Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The confirmation that water exists on the moon isn't the end of the story though. One key question to answer is where the water came from. Several theories have been put forward to explain the origin of the water, including debris from comet impacts, interaction of the lunar surface with the solar wind, and even giant molecular clouds passing through the solar system, Delory said.

Scientists also want to examine the data further to figure out what state the water is in. Colaprete said that based on initial observations, it is likely water ice is interspersed between dirt particles on the lunar surface.

Some other questions scientists want to answer are what kinds of processes move, destroy and create the water on the surface and how long the water has been there, Delory said.

Link to Chandrayaan?

Scientists also are looking to see if there is any link between the water observed by LCROSS and that discovered by Chandrayaan-1.

"Their observation is entirely unique and complementary to what we did," Colaprete said. Scientists still need to work out whether the water observed by Chandrayaan-1 might be slowly migrating to the poles, or if it is unrelated.

Bottom line, the discovery completely changes scientists' view of the moon, Wargo said.

The discovery gives "a much bigger, potentially complicated picture for water on the moon" than what was thought even just a few months ago, he said. "This is not your father's moon; this is not a dead planetary body."

Let's go?

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.

"Water really is one of the constituents of one of the most powerful rocket fuels, oxygen and hydrogen," Wargo said.

The water LCROSS detected "would be water you could drink, water like any other water," Colaprete said. "If you could clean it, it would be drinkable water."

The impact was observed by LCROSS's sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.

The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientists had had time to comb through the probe's data.

NASA launched LCROSS - short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite - and LRO in June.

NASA to Subject Monkeys to Radiation

By Clara Moskowitz, Staff Writer

posted: 12 November 2009 09:54 am ET

NASA plans to subject a group of monkeys to radiation to study what might happen to humans on long-term space missions, such as trips to the moon and Mars.

The research is the first time in decades that NASA has performed tests on primates, though the agency famously relied on the close human relatives to make some of the first forays into space in the 1950s.

"The overall objective of the planned studies with the nonhuman primates is to help NASA predict neurobehavioral effects of space radiation, which are among the most poorly understood health risks for astronauts," NASA spokesman Bill Jeffs told SPACE.com.

The agency plans to aim high-energy gamma-ray radiation at 27 squirrel monkeys, then observe how they perform tasks to see how they're affected, Florida Today reported. The experiment is meant to simulate the type of radiation humans are exposed to in space. As NASA plans trips to farther destinations, people will be spending longer amounts of time outside the Earth's protective atmosphere, so more knowledge of the health effects is vital, NASA said.

"NASA-funded research has shown that simulated space radiation can affect nerve cells in culture and also the behavior of mice and rats, but these studies are limited in the extent they can be extrapolated to human behavior and performance," Jeffs said. "Studies in nonhuman primates are essential to be able to best predict neurobehavioral effects of radiation on humans."

But some animal welfare advocates object to the use of monkeys in research that could harm them.

A group of about 100,000 doctors, nurses and laypersons recently petitioned the space agency to put off the $1.75 million project, Florida Today reported, calling the experiment "one giant leap backward for NASA."

The doctor planning to carry out the study for NASA, Jack Bergman of Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Boston, declined to comment for this story.

Other scientists who have worked with non-human primates defended the need for this type of research.

"Due to their phylogenetic proximity to human beings, non-human primates provide a research subject as close to humans as possible," said Christian R. Abee of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, who is not involved in the current project, but consulted with NASA for earlier primate studies. "Therefore, they are the ultimate translational science subject for many studies."

The upcoming study intends to expose the test monkeys to a blast of radiation roughly equivalent to what astronauts would be exposed to on a three-year space voyage - the length of time it would take people to travel to Mars. Though the exposure will likely cause some cellular damage, it will not kill the monkeys, NASA told Florida Today.

NASA maintained that the experiments would provide important knowledge for designing future missions.

"Currently, there is no information regarding the effects of space radiation on neurobehavioral function in nonhuman primates," Jeffs said.

By SPACE.com staff

posted: 10 November 2009 10:11 am ET

A young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to be home to a wild - and young - planetary system that shares some of the frenetic dynamics thought to have shaped the early years of our own solar system.

The Spitzer observations suggest young planets circling the star are disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

The star, called HR 8799, became one of the first of two stars with planets that were directly imaged from Earth in November 2008. Ground-based telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system. Each of the three distant worlds is roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

HR 8799 is younger and more massive than our sun, which is more than 4.5 billion years old and more than 300,000 times the mass of Earth. It is about 129 light-years from Earth, so scientists weren't sure if Spitzer would be able to snap a picture of its debris disk. But to their amazement, it succeeded.

The Spitzer team, led by Kate Su of the University of Arizona, Tucson, says the giant cloud of fine dust around the disk is very unusual. The researchers say this dust must be coming from collisions among small bodies similar to the comets or icy bodies that make up today's Kuiper Belt objects in our solar system.

"The system is very chaotic and collisions are spraying up a huge cloud of fine dust," Su said.

The gravity of the three large planets is throwing the smaller bodies off course, causing them to migrate around and collide with each other. Astronomers think the planets may have yet to reach their final stable orbits, so more violence could be in store.

A similar setup has also been seen by Spitzer and the Hubble Space Telescope around the star Fomalhaut, which sits about 25 light-years from Earth.

"What's exciting is that we have a direct link between a planetary disk and imaged planets," Su said. "We've been studying disks for a long time, but this star and Fomalhaut are the only two examples of systems where we can study the relationships between the locations of planets and the disks."

When our solar system was young, astronomers think it went through similar planet migrations. Jupiter and Saturn moved around quite a bit, throwing comets around, sometimes into Earth.

Some say the most extreme part of this phase, called the late heavy bombardment, explains how our planet got water. Wet, snowball-like comets are thought to have crashed into Earth, delivering life's favorite liquid.

The Spitzer results are detailed in the Nov. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.