"Detection of intact lava tubes at Marius Hills on the Moon by SELENE (Kaguya) Lunar Radar Sounder"
Intact lunar lava tubes offer a pristine environment to conduct scientific examination of the Moon's composition and potentially serve as secure shelters for humans and instruments. We investigated the SELENE Lunar Radar Sounder (LRS) data at locations close to the Marius Hills Hole (MHH), a skylight potentially leading to an intact lava tube, and found a distinctive echo pattern exhibiting a precipitous decrease in echo power, subsequently followed by a large second echo peak that may be evidence for the existence of a lava tube. The search area was further expanded to 13.00–15.005°N, 301.85–304.01°E around the MHH and similar LRS echo patterns were observed at several locations. Most of the locations are in regions of underground mass deficit suggested by GRAIL gravity data analysis. Some of the observed echo patterns are along rille A, where the MHH was discovered, or on the southwest underground extension of the rille.
If the moon had ancient volcanic activity and thus, why is it, after observable impact from various bodies - shown in the craters all over the surface, and the sumizing of the fact that water was deposited to earth from extra-orbital impacts... does the moon have zero water or atmosphere?
Where did water originate?
(I didn't know how to format that question any better, so please forgive the fumbly format)
The moon's core isn't made of the swirling molten iron dynamo like Earth's is. No swirling molten iron, no magnetic field. No magnetic field, nothing deflects the solar wind that then, literally, blows away any fledgling atmosphere.
It's believed that Mars' atmosphere was considerably more dense than it is today, but along the way, its core cooled, and it lost its protective magnetic shield, allowing the solar wind to strip away much of its atmosphere.
Yes, it is possible that with a magnetic field the moon's gravity would be sufficient to retain an atmosphere. Titan has an atmosphere denser than earth's atmosphere despite having a lower gravity than the moon. There are a few hypotheses why and one of them is that, although Titan has no magnetic field of its own, it orbits inside Saturn's magnetosphere.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/8345/how-does-...
No, for that matter Mars doesn't have the gravity to retain an atmosphere either. I can't cite a source on this because I don't remember where I read it but I believe having a magnetic field surrounding a celestial body is a relatively minor factor in atmosphere retention compared to mass. If someone who specializes in planetary atmosphere retention knows better feel free to eviscerate me.
Titan is not only protected by Saturn's magnetic field, but it is also very cold. Some of the molecules that are gaseous on Earth are liquids on Titan. Cold gases have lower pressure, and less likelihood of bouncing a light molecule high enough up in the atmosphere that the solar wind can grab it and blow it away.
Earth has a hard time holding on to light molecules like H2 and He, but its He is replenished somewhat by alpha decay, and it takes a long time to get from the inside of a rock to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Most of the hydrogen is attached to heavier molecules. But it happens eventually, and even the Earth's magnetic field and gravity can't keep them. Venus is almost as massive as Earth, but it is hotter than Mercury and has no core-generated magnetic field. So most of its water has already thermally dissociated (which happens slowly starting at around 800 degC) and the H, H2, He, and monoatomic O bounces high up into the atmosphere, ionizes, and blows away. So now Venus has about 90 bar of CO2 and barely any water left.
One of the terraforming proposals for Venus is to transport a large quantity of hydrogen from Jupiter to Venus, and use Fe catalyst to react it with the CO2, to get graphite C, H2O, and O2. That would strip off much of the greenhouse blanket, but the planet would still have to be cooled off and protected from the solar wind to keep all that hydrogen around on a geologic time scale.
Off topic but I’d like it quite a lot if people could be informative without being eviscerating lol. I suppose this doesn’t usually happen, but it should happen more. That’d be so much better, so much more tolerable and happier. It’d be good for all of us probably lol.
I think eviscerating comes when people present false statements as facts. Qualifying it with uncertainty as the OP did probably won't anger anybody. But telling lies because you don't know what you're talking about justifiably does.
You're pointing to an important difference: between being uninformed but trying to get towards being informed, and being uninformed but fiercely protective of your certainty.
What Would Feynman Do?
In this case, I'm imagining he'd say these are some of the things we think might explain bodies' keeping or losing atmosphere, but we have to remember that almost everything we think we know about planets and moons comes from looking at the light that bounces off of them and making guesses about the underlying rules, but we still don't know do much about the underlying rules of physics, so there's probably more that we don't know than what we do know about atmosphere retention.
A Martian atmosphere (not sure about a lunar atmosphere) would be lost on a timescale of tens of millions of years. That's very quick in cosmological timescales, but slow enough that any human effort to create or replenish it could be very successful.
That said, the earth's atmosphere has a mass of about five billion billion tons. For reference, as a species, we produce about ten billion tons of concrete each year. This is just to give a sense to the scale of effort involved in replacing a planetary atmosphere.
Depending on the volume of surface ice (especially at the poles), might it be possible to produce atmosphere on a massive scale via orbital lenses or mirrors? With recent advances in solar sail technology, I can't imagine the implementation would be too far removed from current capabilities.
Think about how large of a lens you're talking about. Even if it were one hundred meters across and was able to collect 100% of the sun's energy passing through it, the amount of energy produced would be utterly insignificant compared to the problem we're discussing. And how would you get a one hundred meter lens to mars orbit? Even after that, you have to consider that we want an oxygen atmosphere, not one made of water vapors.
I don't know what you mean by "too far removed from current capabilities", but I doubt we'll even start working on the problem for two or three centuries.
No, it seems more likely to me that we'd use our growing knowledge of genetics and psychology to hack out the part of ourselves that needs to be outside, and opt for a purely enclosed existence on Mars.
The IKAROS sail (launched 2010) is 196 m^2, using aluminum as a reflector (about 90% efficiency). With regards to transferring a lens to orbit, that is a self-solving problem - a large lens or mirror can both be used as a solar sail, potentially even hauling additional mass to Mars orbit.
Mars receives 593 W/m^2 flux, so each IKAROS-sized reflector could produce about 100 KW of energy. Given the expected difficulty of large scale terraforming and colonization efforts, it seems the cost of, say, the equivalent of 10,000 IKAROS-sized mirrors (~1 GW, comparable to a large nuclear plant) would be relatively minor.
Whether that would be more cost effective than shipping an equivalently powerful reactor or other generator is questionable - it will presumably depend on our lifting capacities.
That's about ~250x the JWST. Given that we're talking about a society that has developed far enough to be sending people to Mars and terraforming the landscape, I don't think that 8 doublings would be an unreasonable multiplier of current capability. Still a flagship, many-decade mission though.
The James Webb mirror is a rigid, astonishingly precise focusing element. A solar energy mirror could instead be merely approximately parabolic, made of a foil instead of cryogenic, made of metalized kapton instead of gold-plated beryllium, would forego focusing elements, and so on.
However, the thought of a telescope-quality mirror 250x the size of the JWST is pretty amazing :)
With lenses you could also burn the soil to produce gases that add up to he atmosphere ... but we want breathable atmosphere. With lot's of oxygen and very little co2. And that is a bit harder ...
So you also couldn't just vaporize the ice, you need to split it up. Solar heat could be sufficient, but the water will then be missed everywhere else on mars where life wants to grow.
And Mars is dry.
So I would first use the water in enclosed habitats. And then after, if there is plenty of water left, one could start to think about smoking that up ..
But there might be other options, once you have lot's and lot's of autonomous machines and rockets available and allmost unlimited fuel (sun?). But without that? Not a chance ...
I wonder if it would be a reasonable colonization process to establish a non-breathable atmosphere, allowing postprocessing facilities to later separate oxygen from airborne water vapour.
The notable benefits from such an approach would be the ability to easily deliver asteroid-based water deposits (aim it at Mars, let reentry do the rest), as well as the significant simplification of ground based colonization technology - it's far easier to build resilient habitats for a non-breathable atmosphere than it is for a vacuum, and the risk of accidents and difficulty of venturing outside is much, much lessened (a face mask or filter and oxygen tank instead of a bulky spacesuit), not to mention the radiation protection afforded by a thick atmosphere.
Also many thermoforming efforts consider adding an artificial dynamo (using, say, superconducting rings) to protect both the atmosphere and life on the surface. The energy cost of maintaining an artificial dynamo would be less than the incremental maintenance cost of maintaining atmosphere and dealing with health risks from radiation.
Interesting, it only needs a 1-2 Tesla magnetic field. MRI machines go up to 3T, which means this isn't too outlandish with known technology. The main issue is that they probably want a Mars sized field at 1-2T.
I don't know the rate of atmospheric loss, but it might be possible to introduce air at a high enough rate to outstrip the losses, making for a sustainable atmosphere. It would presumably depend on the availability of ice and other volatiles.
The same place that water came from on Earth... comet impacts and residual moisture from the impact that split the Earth-Moon system. Really the same place all planetary water and gas has come from.
There's not much left because it mostly boils off due to low pressure, but in dark crevasses it's likely to stay cold enough to remain condensed. It's been measured spectroscopically.
The reason water exists on earth, and not on mars, may be that life on earth saved the water by discovering photosynthesis.
The discovery of photosynthesis caused the "great oxygenation event" which pumped oxygen into the atmosphere. Oxygen reacts with atmospheric hydrogen to form water. Without the oxygen, the very light hydrogen molecules would float to the top of the atmosphere and are easily blown away by solar winds, which is what happened on Mars. But with high oxygen concentrations on Eath, hydrogen molecules react to form heavier water molecules before they have a chance to be blown away, and thus hydrogen and water are retained.
I read about this in the book "Oxygen" by Nick Lane.
That seems like it must be incorrect. Life on earth evolved in the oceans, so the oceans had to exist for eons before life evolved and the eons it took for life to evolve photosynthesis and produce significant amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere. If what you're saying is correct, then the earth either started out with much more water than it has now, or the hydrogen escaped a lot more slowly than I'd expect it to.
The book was written in 2002, and I just looked up Nick lane's latest 2016 take on it here: [1]
His point in this new article is that instead of one big "oxygenation event" there may have been multiple. But he sticks to his story that the creation of an ozone layer by photosynthesis was the key step in saving the oceans. He argues both Mars and Earth had oceans originally (confirmed by Mars Satellite observations), which were gradually diminished by a process in which ultraviolet light splits atmospheric water, minerals on the surface absorbed the oxygen (rusting, making Mars red) leaving the hygrogen to blow away. But life on earth pumped extra oxygen into the atmosphere, faster than minerals could aborb it, creating the reactive ozone layer which prevented hydrogen from blowing away, thus saving the oceans from their fate on Mars.
I've been in planetary science and never encountered this theory. I have a default position of skepticism towards it for that reason, but I don't have a reason to object on the face of it. The question is not where the oceans came from (that's settled -- it came out of the mantle as the Earth cooled, and ultimately before that from cometary impact), but how the oceans did not boil or evaporate off like they did everywhere else. I could understand a theory that they were kept from boiling by being in the habitable zone AND by some combination of life processes, and that this hydrogen-capture mechanism helped replenish the ocean as hydrogen escaped from natural gas upwellings. But I have no sense of the scales and magnitudes involved to see if inputs approximately match outputs without seeing the underlying paper.
<quote>but how the oceans did not boil or evaporate off like they did everywhere else.</quote>
gravity and magnetic field? if it were hydrogen or helium it would be stripped off by solar wind (storms) like everywhere else, but water is quite heavy due to the oxygen.
also 'everywhere else' means practically mercur, mars and asteroids (moon). no idea about venus.
ice giants keeps their water also due to gravity and far apart on pluto it's frozen like rock.
> Life on earth evolved in the oceans, so the oceans had to exist for eons before life evolved
I can't intelligently contribute to the overall discussion here, but I know one of the most interesting things about the currently understood timeline is the apparent lack of eons between the earliest conditions conducive to life after its initial cooling and the earliest evidence of life. Don't quote me on exact numbers, but within margins of error, as I understand it, it's like in the range of millions of years, not billions (which has all sorts of interesting implications for both the Fermi paradox and religious thinkers) Though, as far as I know, you'd still be correct on the distance to photosynthesis.
Or not; the “land theory” (that it began in shallow, possibly volcanic, terrestrial pools”) and “sea theory” (that it began in oceans, possibly at hydrothermal vents) have been competing theories forever, essentially.
> Where did the comets get the water they impacted on earth?
Hydrogen comes from primordial nucleosynthesis [1] and makes up most of the interstellar medium [2]. Oxygen is produced when neutron stars collide and stars explode [3] as well as when some stars burn [4]. These freely combined in the gas disk from which our solar system formed, condensing into planets, moons, comets and other things [5].
There is a "frost line" in the middle of the asteroid belt where you see rocky objects closer and icy objects further. The reason is that closer the Sun has enough energy to sublimate the icy objects into a comet with a tail, where the tail is the icy material being blown off into space. Over billions of years that results in objects with ice-free rocky surfaces inside the frost line, and big, gaseous, volatile-rich outer solar system objects.
So at the time of the formation of the solar system, the whole area was a big gaseous cloud of supernova debris with lots of ice. The ignition of the sun started the frost line, and pushed volatiles out of the inner solar system. However some had already been trapped in the formation of the planets, and rose to the surface as they cooled. That's where Earth's ocean came from, and we know Mars and Venus had oceans too. Presumably also Mercury, although I'm sure that was short-lived.
So yes, it's all from cometary material. But then ALL of the Earth is from cometary material, and the oceans only make up a small amount of the Earth's total mass.
Earth likely had some water during early creation (accretion) but the best theory on how the Moon formed is that a Mars sized object hit the early Earth at the end of accretion. This blasted much of the Earth's rock part (mantle) and any water it might have had into orbit. The rock part quickly fell back to Earth and the rest condensed and collapsed to form the moon. The water and other volatilizes that were on Earth were blown away by the solar wind at that time. The surface of the Earth and Moon would have been boiling lava at this point and had to accumulate water from new impacts of comets and icy asteroids.
The water on Earth may seem to be a lot to us on the surface but it is only about 0.02% by mass [1].
There's actually a lot of water in the mantle of the Earth. There's something like 3x the current ocean volume trapped in the mantle, and there are theories that pressure differentials cause this water to escape as gaseous water escapes from the atmosphere. It would explain why the ocean happens to be approximately the height of the continental shelf, and always has been. Under this theory the water simply emerged as the Earth cooled from the impact. The Moon, on the other hand, would be missing this water as the debris was mostly stripped of water content as it accreted.
Stars produce oxygen (along with all elements up to iron) during nuclear fusion. If the star is big (several times bigger than our sun), it eventually explodes and the oxygen then winds up in interstellar gas and dust. The oxygen reacts with hydrogen to make water. Eventually you wind up with a lot of dirty snowballs floating around (comets).
Oxygen is pretty common and hydrogen is everywhere, so water (as ice) is not scarce in the universe. The only place where water is uncommon is near a star, like us, where the water boils off into space unless a planet has enough gravity to hold it in.
Under what circumstances does one need to have in order to make them combine into water, organically? (Meaning without any device or machine, assume you have two big clouds of each element floating in space - if they collide, do the naturally just form into water molecules?)
At reasonable temperatures, yes, the clouds turn into water and release energy, hydrogen burns. Water is entropically preferred as a lower energy state than separate atoms/molecules because of lower enthalpy at reasonable temperatures. Depending on density and ignition sources the reaction rate may vary, but it doesn't have to explode in a ms when there is a billion years available.
That's not what "entropically preferred" means. If something is a lower-energy state, it's energetically preferred, but may or may not be entropically preferred. Water is NOT - entropy would prefer simpler molecules over more structured molecules.
I think the concept you're thinking of is free energy, which determines the final destination of a process. The equation relating these things is (change in free energy) = (change in energy) - temperature × (change in entropy). Entropy only becomes the dominant component when temperature is high. And, as expected, water molecules dissociate at high temperature.
No, since this was chemistry, I was talking about enthalpy of an exothermic reaction (negative enthalpy), and interstellar space is pretty close to constant pressure, but not constant entropy for Gibbs free energy.
In any case:
dH=TdS + Vdp note dp is small in space but V can be large and dS is the change in entropy.
...and enthalpy of ideal (interstellar H & O) gases does not depend on pressure, unlike entropy and Gibbs energy. If you really just mean free energy U, then they are basically the same thing in open space (but not in a plasma), a distinction without difference.
For further pedantics I recommend Wikipedia, since I doubt we are helping anyone else.
They randomly form and are destroyed over time due to collisions at various energies. It's also more common for ions to form in space which makes such simple chemical reactions easier.
Yes, oxygen and hydrogen mixed together will eventually react to form water. To react, atoms or molecules simply need to collide hard enough to overcome their initial repulsion and form bonds. In space it is a slow process, because the pressure and temperature are both low - this means the atoms rarely hit each other, and when they hit, they don't hit very hard.
H2O is probably the second, third, or fourth most common molecule in the observable universe. H2 is definitely the most common, and all you need is a good explosion from a CNO-cycle star (viz. heavier than 1.3 solar masses) to liberate all those fusion-catalyzing oxygen nuclei, and they readily combine with any H2 they may meet.
So in a stellar accretion disc, much of the water will end up inside the new star, and dissociate, but quite a lot of it will gather in the planets, moons, and comets. Europa, for example, has about 2 or 3 Earth-oceans worth of water. Uranus and Neptune likely have solid cores composed mainly of ices that include water ice.
Water is formed naturally when the oxygen created by the fusion process in stars combines with the hydrogen from those same stars, often after a supernova explosion.
Water is fairly abundant in the universe. As are alcohols.
The moon’s gravity isn’t strong enough to hold water vapor or any other atmospheric gas. It would either get siphoned off by the earth or just fly off into the solar system.
If you are trying to go back to "why is there anything?", then the answer is "we don't know precisely, but we do know that if those things hadn't happened, we wouldn't be asking the question, so so we have no basis of knowing whether it's random, rare, or a near-certainty for a new universe."
If that's the case, why haven't we been hit by any in recorded history that gave us more water?
How many comets have hit us that were rife with water supplies to provide the amount of water earth has given that water isn't also abundant on planets that are much larger, like Jupiter?
Why do we see planets with atmospheres of say sulfer, and earth doesn't have an issue with sulfer in the atmosphere?
I saw a recent study that said the moon probably did have atmosphere from volcanic activity... but only for around 70 million years. It dissipated into space.
As a boy in the early seventies, reading Tintin: Destination Moon, I was always put off by the episode with the underground cave full of slippery ice. That was clearly an outdated view of lunar conditions, which somewhat dented my suspense of disbelief.
Sounds like we need to send a probe or ten to the Moon. Who knows what’s down there? (Although the answer is going to be “some rocks” as far as most non-astronomers are concerned.)
Probably ice. Ice that falls into the entrance and then sublimates has a good chance of moving to perpetual darkness regions and to stay there. Factor a couple billion years and you probably will have a decent amount.
Now imagine there is some simple biology happening from the time the Moon had some atmosphere, in caves sealed billions of years ago.
I wasn't thinking about complex lifeforms, as there isn't enough energy in those dark caves to power anything complicated, but some rock-eaters could have thrived there.
It's remarkable the Moon has so many interesting stories waiting to be uncovered.
I wonder how stable such tubes would be? No water erosion, no earthquakes, even though they must have formed at a time that was more geologically active.
They could be on the edge of collapse if say, a large vehicle drove in them. Am I wrong?
Just a first thought. Other than that, they could probably serve as a goal for human spaceflight, an intermediate step between walking on the moon and colonizing mars.
The article mentions the use of inflatable housing inside. Seems like a wise move given we have so little experience with their stability.
If they've survived this long, then presumably they are very unlikely to collapse on their own. That is, settlers would only need to worry about collapse cause by their own movements.
The odds of them being 'on the verge of collapse' are relatively low in my thinking. Unless there is some process that takes them to the edge and then stops that we don't understand. Otherwise, they are likely to have either already collapsed or be somewhat stable.
The moon is pretty dead, so no processes exist... if they’re stable, barring asteroid strike. They’d remain stable. The problem is metastability, the “death block” problem in ice climbing.
I'd imagine the tubes are relatively stable because they regularly (at geologic time scales) experience seismic disturbances from weak plate tectonic activity and especially impact events.
> no earthquakes
No but how about moon-quakes? Ok, not geologically active you say. But moon's been bombarded by asteroids it's surface is full of craters. Creating a crater wouldn't that be an equivalent of a moon-quake?
This is the correct answer. These lava tubes are, at their youngest, a couple billion years old. Since then, the moon has been thwacked very hard and -- on those timescales -- often. If the tubes haven't collapsed yet, then there's a high likelihood that they're exceptionally stable.
What about the sun's? If the force is strong enough to make earth orbit, and moon-to-sun distance oscillates, plus seasonal behaviour, there must be quite some straining tides...
> And many scientists have long dreamed of building bases inside natural moon caves, where lunar explorers might sleep safely in inflatable homes, protected from the storms above.
Maybe solar storms? The Sun sends out quite a lot of radiation from time to time. Earth is protected by its magnetic field and atmosphere, the Moon and Mars not so much.
Am I incorrect without an active lava core, the magnetic field is basically non-existient? Then Moon tunnel is probably not good enough for humans to remain healthy.
Also water serves as very good shielding. Anybody living in caves in the moon would naturally need an ample water supply (a "closet" full of water containers), which could double as an emergency radiation shelter.
The reference to the caves protecting from storms is to the preceding sentence in the paragraph that mentions lunar tunnels giving protection from meteors and radiation.
"Let's dig a tunnel to the centre of the moon!"
"You can't dig a tunnel to the centre of the moon, Blode!"
"Yes I can! It will be a special tunnel, and it will go to the centre of the moon!"
I don't recall that quip, but I do recall an episode of "Space 1999" decades ago titled "The Catacombs of the Moon" where they discover a vast underground cave system, (which turns out to be the hibernation place for a civilisation of aliens, IIRC)... The episode always had me intrigued as to whether the moon actually could have a large cave system that could be hermetically sealed and inhabited by humans to save on shipping tons of building materials out there.
Yes, and it's one of the oldest and seriously touted plans for lunar settlement. Apollo 15 landed next to and studied a collapsed lava tube, so we even have ground truth here.
I'm only familiar with Bird Law, and as there are no birds on the moon, I am sure that "rock law" will predominate in that if I hit you over the head with a big enough rock, I then obviously own the moon.
Err.... I just gave an example of one that wasn't "ignored". The world was divided up between Portugal and Spain by the Pope, never mind that most of it was largely unknown to Europeans at the time, and never mind that it was already populated by millions of people with their own countries and rules of land ownership. And the treaty was effective, to a very large degree. South America is almost entirely Spanish-speaking (except for Brazil, which wound up on the Portuguese side of the line). Many African and Asian countries (former colonies) speak Portuguese.
Not only was it not "ignored", but it's still effective 500 years later.
If such a treaty can be applied to inhabited lands, what makes you think one can't be applied to the lifeless terra nullius of the Moon?
Your very link shows a number of times the treaty was ignored.
The treaty you point out found its inception from a treaty that wasn't followed from less than a decade prior! This is even explained in your link.
And for the treaty itself, this is mentioned, "It was superseded by the 1750 Treaty of Madrid which granted Portugal control of the lands it occupied in South America. However, the latter treaty was immediately repudiated by the Catholic Monarch. The First Treaty of San Ildefonso settled the problem, with Spain acquiring territories east of the Uruguay River and Portugal acquiring territories in the Amazon Basin. Emerging Protestant maritime powers, particularly England and The Netherlands, and other third parties such as Roman Catholic France, did not recognize the division of the world between only two Roman Catholic nations brokered by the pope."
There is also this very important point about how this treaty was followed, "It did not specify the line in degrees, nor did it identify the specific island or the specific length of its league. Instead, the treaty stated that these matters were to be settled by a joint voyage which never occurred."
You are confusing the self-interest of countries with a non-existent requirement to follow words on paper. Countries follow treaties to the extent of alignment with their own interests. If treaties were always followed by countries, then this world would be a far different place than it is today. There would also have been far fewer agreed upon treaties.
"Your very link shows a number of times the treaty was ignored."
And yet it largely remains effective. Despite all the things you mention, people still speak Spanish in the Spanish half. Ask the Aztecs, Incas, Mayas... how pragmatically effective the Pope's grant was.
I'm really not sure what your argument is here.
"The power goes out once in a while, therefore electricity is useless"? "Doctors can't always save the patient, therefore medicine is useless"? "People sometimes murder, therefore we should not have laws against murder"?
My argument is what I originally wrote, "Treaties on Earth have very little meaning. They have zero meaning on the Moon." That argument is supported by the contents of your link.
You posted a link to show a treaty that has been in force. However, your link shows the exact opposite of that. The treaty has never been in force, was started because an earlier treaty wasn't followed, and has been superseded multiple times by other treaties.
This is a very wise answer! This reminds me of the movie "Iron Sky" which involves Nazis on the Moon. I found the film surprisingly intelligent (at least more than I expected) and had some visually nice political commentary.
Are there any figures on the minimum $/gram of minerals that would justify a mining mission (presumably unmanned)? Just can't imagine that gold, platinum or any stable metal would be worth it. Maybe high grade diamonds that don't need to be extracted from other rock. The surveys would have likely identified the presence of such a high density substance and we haven't seen any mention of it.
I know you probably meant in terms rights to the "best" cave on the moon, but I'm just wondering what happens if the cave turns out to filled with frozen water, for example, that would be worth its weight in antimatter (not quite) on the moon.
The most common elements on the moon are quite common on the earth too; I don't think the value in mining them will ever come from bringing the mined materials back to earth. The value is going to come from having and maintaining an established base on the moon. The moon is a high point in the earth's gravity well that's full of raw materials that can be used to build things that can go further out. Mining on the moon is going to be about building and supplying interplanetary (and maybe interstellar) spaceships, not selling jewelry back on earth.
The most common elements, sure. It's the rare elements that are more interesting. Many of these are rare on both Earth and the Moon because they are iron soluble and sank to the core. On Earth they get replenished from either asteroid impact or volcanism, then plate tectonics and hydration cycles slowly move the material back into the mantle or away from the site of deposit. Those processes don't exist on the Moon, so there's been ~3.5bn years of bombardment leaving precious-metal rich deposits on the surface of the Moon, where they remain until someone comes by to pick them up. You'll find that most of the Moon is boring rocks only a geologist could love, and then a bunch of super highly concentrated ores at deposit sites. And these deposit sites are not hard to find either. Just look for craters...
Given enough potential profit, getting there shouldn't be a big problem. You already have a bunch of nations currently selling orbital launches, and various private companies didn't seem to have big problems designing their own engines and rockets.
If you think getting to the Moon is hard, where many resources are surface extractable, look into what it takes to mine certain ores on Earth kilometers below ground in remote regions.
Are you saying piracy is fine in space? It's not the way I read the treaty - sounds like it'd be not ok - therefore potentially opening up options for "defense" based armament.
The treaty explicitly says that piracy is not okay. In fact, because of the way outer space is in many cases treated as international waters, the same laws governing piracy on the seas govern space activities as well, just with some differences regarding how ships are assigned to nations ("what flag they fly").
However the real outstanding issue with the OST is how to handle mining claims. Claim jumping is a real issue, since you could spend a ton of money prospecting a resource, only to have your competition to rush over and build a hut on top of it and legally claim it as their own.
There needs to be some sort of mechanism, perhaps even not governmental if renegotiating the OST is too dangerous or unlikely to happen soon, by which a company can claim a mining claim over a resource they have prospected and have that claim be legally protected from claim jumpers for a period of time.
Space nerds theorized moon caves since the 80s.
Moon caves created by young moon lava flows billions of years ago found in early 2000s.
Japanese space agency finished mapping a tunnel last week and found it's 50km long and 500m wide with a flat bottom perfect for building space buildings in.
This is news that's breaking to a revitalized moon rocket industry with all agencies and players building their own big moon rocket. New Glenn for blue origins, bfr for spacex, sls for NASA, ACES for ULA (boeing aerospace + lockmart
) Chinese have also expressed interest in a moon base.
As someone whose job was once to work with that data, yes. It’s a tremendous amount of data and the resources allocated is often a half dozen grad students with a copy of MATLAB. The big iron is only really applied to create the official maps for the planetary science data archives, then real analysis is often paid for piecemeal with relatively small grants.
No one does according to the Outer Space Treaty. No one can according to the Moon Treaty. (Thankfully the major powers didn’t ratify that one.) In practice, common law has ruled that physical possession constitutes ownership with the precedent of the Apollo artifacts and Lunakhod rover.
Whoever gets there first, and can realistically form a threat credible enough to defend it.
You’ll probably need the backing of a nuclear power, although off-world representation of earthly countries might not turn out to be particularly credible threats (enough to intimidate new emerging space-based powers), or remain truly politically cohesive with their root terrestrial counterparts, depending...
This is actually the way the Outer Space Treaty is written - a state party to it retains jurisdiction over any object it launches, but is required to keep it open to "representatives" of other state parties.
If it came to blows, chances are that the battles would be fought on Earth. Launching anything is expensive. Launching anything manned is prohibitively expensive. Armaments would just increase the cost and the risk.
Launching a rock back at earth would probably be quite cheap given you need to have propellents on hand to be there in the first place. So at some point of habitation, moon based folks will bid for Independence.
Even without exploitable resources, space observation (telescopes) and communications systems on the Moon would have to contend with less interference from terrestrial noise, I’d guess. Having a foothold on the Moon would definitely assist further space exploration.
Getaways to the moon would also become a great new tourism industry for the ultra-rich and wealthy, whose money would in turn spur advancements in off-world habitation and comfort that could trickle down to the general populace.
I also think all human political leadership should be relocated to the Moon, at least for a week or two every year, to help them appreciate Earth a little better [0].
Sorry meant to expand more. The fact that the moon has such lower gravity than the earth means it's a lot cheaper in theory to get stuff from the surface of the moon to orbit than from earth
But there isn’t exactly a lot of readily available resources on the moon, so until that changes your just paying to lift stuff twice. Water may be an exception to this?
You can use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, aka, fuel. Finding an underground ice lake would provide lots of fuel, and save on lifting the heaviest, most important substance for manned exploration from earth.
The point would be that the stuff we would use to explore/colonize the solar system would be made on the Moon with a relatively low investment in stuff having to be send there to set up the base and mining/production process. Ideally only humans themselves and a few personal items would be send up from Earth, with everything else having been produced in orbit.
Speaking of "moon tunnels" why not send TBMs up thete and mine whateveratetials are in the crust while building fused wall smooth habitats and transportation and hydroponic garming areas, etc. Id build it at the poles so that sumligjt is fairly readily available all "lunar day" otherwise you need some nuclear power up there or solar power station at the poles beaming mw power.
"Detection of intact lava tubes at Marius Hills on the Moon by SELENE (Kaguya) Lunar Radar Sounder"
Intact lunar lava tubes offer a pristine environment to conduct scientific examination of the Moon's composition and potentially serve as secure shelters for humans and instruments. We investigated the SELENE Lunar Radar Sounder (LRS) data at locations close to the Marius Hills Hole (MHH), a skylight potentially leading to an intact lava tube, and found a distinctive echo pattern exhibiting a precipitous decrease in echo power, subsequently followed by a large second echo peak that may be evidence for the existence of a lava tube. The search area was further expanded to 13.00–15.005°N, 301.85–304.01°E around the MHH and similar LRS echo patterns were observed at several locations. Most of the locations are in regions of underground mass deficit suggested by GRAIL gravity data analysis. Some of the observed echo patterns are along rille A, where the MHH was discovered, or on the southwest underground extension of the rille.