Starship Asterisk*

http://www.universetoday.com/70174/radar-images-reveal-tons-of-water-likely-at-the-lunar-poles/#more-70174 wrote:
Radar Images Reveal Tons of Water Likely at the Lunar Poles
Posted in: Moon by Nancy Atkinson

<<Radar has been used since the 1960s to map the lunar surface, but until recently it has been difficult to get a good look at the Moon's poles. In 2009, the Mini-SAR radar instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was able to map more than 95% of both poles at 150 meter radar resolution, and now the Mini-RF instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — which has 10 times the resolution of the Mini-SAR — is about halfway through its first high-resolution mapping campaign of the poles. The two instruments are revealing there are likely massive amounts of water in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles, with over 600 million metric tons at the north pole alone. "If that was turned into rocket fuel, it would be enough to launch the equivalent of one Space Shuttle per day for over 2,000 years," said Paul Spudis, principal investigator for the Mini-SAR, speaking at the annual Lunar Forum at the Ames Research Center in July.>>

beyond wrote:I don't know what the plastic-bottle rocket has to do with water on the moon, but it was really neat!!

beyond wrote:If the sun is ever able to shine on all that ice up there, i hope that the moon has enough gravity to hold all that weight or some of us down here are gonna get soaked!!

oldnewideas wrote:
Considering the moon was once located where the Pacific Ocean is on our planet,
I must question why anyone would be surprised at finding water at its poles.

http://www.answers.com/topic/george-darwin wrote:

<<George Darwin, the second son of the famous biologist Charles Darwin, was born at Down in England. His most significant work was on the evolution of the Earth–Moon system. His basic premise was that the effect of the tides has been to slow the Earth's rotation thus lengthening the day and to cause the Moon to recede from the Earth. He gave a mathematical analysis of the consequences of this, extrapolating into both the future and the past. He argued that some 4.5 billion years ago the Moon and the Earth would have been very close, with a day being less than five hours. Before this time the two bodies would actually have been one, with the Moon residing in what is now the Pacific Ocean. The Moon would have been torn away from the Earth by powerful solar tides that would have deformed the Earth every 2.5 hours. Darwin's theory, worked out in collaboration with Osmond Fisher in 1879, explains both the low density of the Moon as being a part of the Earth's mantle, and also the absence of a granite layer on the Pacific floor. However, the theory is not widely accepted by astronomers. It runs against the Roche limit, which claims that no satellite can come closer than 2.44 times the planet's radius without breaking up; there are also problems with angular momentum. Astronomers today favor the view that the Moon has formed by processes of condensation and accretion. Whatever its faults, Darwin's theory is important as being the first real attempt to work out a cosmology on the principles of mathematical physics.>>