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JonClarke wrote:Hop wrote:Cite?
Lunar meteorite impacts can be as slow as 2.4 km/s.
Some perhaps, but very few.
This paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3010 calls imapctors below 11 km/s "slow", Figure 3a shows that there are effectively none below 10 km/s,
No, figure 3a on page 7 does not show there are effectively no lunar impacts below 10 km/s. A significant portion of the the lunar bell curve lies to the left of 10 km/s. What you say is true of the dotted line (earth's impactors).
Furthermore, on page 12 the authors note their models don't match the lunar impact record. "One possible explanation is related to the impact velocity distributions. The leading/trailing asymmetry becomes more prominent when the average relative velocity between the Moon and the projectiles is low. The NEA-like particles are, by their dynamical definition, the “slowest” (relative to Earth) among all the known small body populations in the solar system. That even these slow particles may not fully account for the observed asymmetric distribution in the lunar crater record suggests that there may exist a presently-unobserved population of small objects near the Earth’s orbit that have even lower average relative velocity than the currently known near-Earth asteroids do."
There are a indeed a few below 10/s, but bulk of the are all above that km/s, only the tail of the histogram is below it. Page 7:
Overall, the average impact velocities of the clones on the lunar surface, ( 22.4 km/s) is almost the same as the average encounter velocity of the original particles at the Earth’s activity sphere. This means that lunar gravity plays only a minor role in accelerating particles to the lunar surface in our numerical model. Not only lunar gravity but the Earth’s gravity also plays only a small role: average impact velocity of the clones at the Earth’s surface is 23.1 km/s, not being very different from the average impact velocity with the lunar surface, in spite of the large difference of the escape velocities from the two bodies ( 11.2 km/s on the Earth and 2.4 km/s on the Moon)
JonClarke wrote:The text of this paper has slightly different numbers - average of 17 km/s and a lower limit of 12 km/s www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1847.full.pdf .
Behind a pay wall. I'll note a 17 km/s average doesn't mean there aren't slower impacts. I am skeptical of the 12 km/s lower limit. I suspect you're misinterpreting this paper as you did the paper by Ito and Malhotra.
Go to a library. Not all knowledge is on the internet. It's a basic part of research. Misinterpreted the paper, no, I have not.
JonClarke wrote:Yet another paper http://128.97.36.172/Warren%20et%20al-s … aradox.pdf suggests 16 km/s as the average and suggests that this number has not changed much throughout the history of the Moon.
Again, an 16 km/s average doesn't demonstrate the nonexistence of slower impacts.
You can draw all the cartoons you like but it won't alter the fact that while they do exist (I have never denied this) but are extremely rare (which all the evidence points to).
Are you saying that low veolcity impacts are the norm? If so, what's your evidence?
duplicate
JonClarke wrote:Only in the metallic form. Not when it is locked up in silicates.
Mercury locked up in silicates? Cite? So as I know it occurs as a native metal or as HgS.
For accumulations of Hg this is correct. But where do you think those accumulations fome from? From tiny amounts(10s to 100s ppb) in silciates (and in some sulphides, if present. These can be stripped by hydrothermal fluids to form the concentrations we called deposits, generally requiring enrichment factors of at least a hundred. I suggest you consult any one of the standard references of the subjct - "Handbook of geochemistry", "Planetary scientist's companion", "Field Geologist's Manual" etc. for details of Hg distribution in rocks and minerals.
And lunar rocks have very low Hg - less than 0.3 parts per billion. That is less than 1% of the average abunance in terrestrial crust.
You heat cinnabar and the mercury vapor separates out. Given that the lower lunar latitudes get quite hot and it's vacuum, you'd expect the Mercury vapor to be baked out of the lunar crust.
Correct, but when the Hg does not occur as a separate phase, the temperagtures are much higher.
Lunar Hg in returned samples occurs in three ways (at least), a labile phase, which can be mobilised at temperatures of <140 degrees, a less labile phase, bolised at higher temperatures but still below 450 degrees, and a high temperature phase, liberated at temperatures above 450 degrees. The total about is low, a few ppb typically - occasionally a few 10s of ppb. The proportions vary markedly from sample to sample and location to location. the most labile phase is probably ultra thin metallic Hg that probably does move round with the diurnal cycle. The less labile phase is probably reacted on coatings, and the high temperature phase occurs in silicates and probably troilite (iron sulphide).
Some of the most labile phase does end up in the lunar atmosphere, but how far it travels is anybody's guess. Given the untrustworthiness of the LCROSS data in this regard it would be specious to say it all ended up at the poles. Some would certainly diffuse downwards and precipiate in the cooler zones only a few cm down.
So some transport certainly, bot not all of it. Given that the Moon is strongly depleted overal in Hg, there isn't that much (1/100th of the solar system average) to start with. This is part of the overal lunar depletion in volatile metals, used by some to argue the giant impact origin for the Moon.
You'd expect mercury to be scarce in the lunar crust, for the same reason you'd expect scarcity of other volatiles.
And those volatile vapors that don't escape to outer space move about the moon's surface. If their travels take them to a cold trap, there they will stay.
There are volatiles and volatiles. Gases are a very different issue to the volatile heavier elements. The Moon is depeleted in the whole range of heavier volatile elements, virtually the whole right hand side of the periodic table. These are crustal averages, not the result of some local process. There is no way that these these volatiles could re resupplied in any meaningful way.
Gases can be trapped at the poles from interplanetary space (both comet tails and the solar wind), as well as from tenporary unar atmospheres from impacts. This has been postulated for deaces, so recent discoveries are confirmation of theory, not some radical discover. The amounts are much smaller and the processes is different.
As far as we know Hg is not enriched in comets (I am not sure it has even been detected), so you would not expect any Hg accumulations to occur.
Your assertion that there's no mechanism to concentrate mercury in the cold traps is wrong.
I could have enunciated it better, but the basic asertion remains valid. There is no plausible mechanism to concentrate such large quantities of Hg at the lunar poles. The source amounts are extremely small, the most likely cold trap for the small amount that would be mobilised is only a few cm away from the mobilisation site, and there is no alternative Hg source (e.g. comets).
Is the same true of gold? I don't know. Off hand, I can't imagine a mechanism that would concentrate gold at the lunar poles. But just because I can't think of one, doesn't mean such a mechanism can't exist. We don't know the history of the minerals in the cold traps. While I'd agree the gold finding isn't conclusive, I reject the notion that it should be disregarded just because it doesn't meet our expectations.
The basic fact remains we have aboslutely no good reason at this stage to believe there is percent level gold at the lunar poles. It is just wishful thinking without further data.
We have further data. I would expect percent level Au, Zn, Hg and the rest to show up in the other remote sensing techniques - Gamma Ray and X-Ray spectrometry for example. As far as I know they don't.
The onus is really on people who say these elements are present at percent level to come up with good evidence. So far there isn't any. One measurement by an unreliable (for these elements) instrument, wih negative confirmation by other instruments means that we have no reason to think that there are Hg and Au deposits at the lunar poles.
JonClarke wrote:Even a metallic asteroid is so dispersed during the impact process that ores do not result, not even of the most adundant elements.
Cite?
Lunar meteorite impacts can be as slow as 2.4 km/s.
Some perhaps, but very few.
This paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3010 calls imapctors below 11 km/s "slow", Figure 3a shows that there are effectively none below 10 km/s, the text also says that the average lunar impact is 22.4 km/s (almost the same as Earth's 23.1 km/s), Figure 3a shows some impact velocities as high at 50 km/s.
The text of this paper has slightly different numbers - average of 17 km/s and a lower limit of 12 km/s www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1847.full.pdf .
Yet another paper http://128.97.36.172/Warren%20et%20al-s … aradox.pdf suggests 16 km/s as the average and suggests that this number has not changed much throughout the history of the Moon.
I could list some more, but instead I am going to bed. Good night!
Also, there are no land costs, no environmental legislation, no mining rights costs, no taxation...that gives lunar mining a really flying start.
In other words, an operating nightmare. Without good goverance companies will not invest, the risk to too great. The is need such that it will emerge when it is required. It is not the lawless regions of the world that attract the greates exploration investment, but the well regulatd ones. For every company prepared to risk the DR of Congo or Liberia there are a hundred investing in Australia or Canada.
No environmetal legislation? There are already agreements involving space debris and the EM bands. There will be environmental regulation on the moon too, making sure that the emissions from the fluorine alumina extration plant don't contaminate the volatile processing at the south pole. That the dust raised by the robots processing the regolith for titania doesn't intefer with the 100 metre UV telescope in Plato. Or the radio communications from consetllations of satellites upset the radio quiet zone surounding the 10 km farside radio dish. Even to preserve the aesthetics of the Moon from Earth (e.g. "no structure on the near side of the Moon may be larger than 10 km").
No land or mining right costs? Who pays for the admistration and policing of liscences and the system of arbitration of dispute? No tax? really? While the head offices are on Earth or the products are sold there you can be sure there will be taxes, royalities, tariffs, and the rest.
If we are going to talk about mining let's look at how the mining industry really operates.
Jon, I respect your credentials but you're clearly talking outside of your expertise.
The old "I respect your credentials but..." approach. We will see. Until then, kindly don't make assumptions about what I do or do not know.
Recent analysis of Apollo data and later orbiters show large-scale migration of dust particles due to electrostatic transport. There are too many sources to site one individually--just google "lunar dust migration".
I learned this about 30 years ago It is not that recent an idea. While almost certainly correct, it does not mean in can be invoked to explain gold ocurrences. Gold occurs at ppb level in lunar rocks and therefore will be locked p in silicate grains. It won't show differentil movement under electrostatic influence.
Large metallic and stony impactors are known to survive impact on Earth, clearly the same thing is going on on the Moon where impacts can be much, much slower. Note that the whole raised lunar farside is now believed to be composed of impactor material from Earth's "second moon" that impacted at reduced velocity.
Small impactors survive on Earth, forming meteorites. This is because they are slowed by the atmosphere. Large ones are not and are vapourised or dispersed as droplets, mixed with a much greater volume of ejected target rocks. They Moon has no atmosphere and even the smallest bodies will impact at>2.8km a second, and almost always considerably more. That is why no meteorites were found on the Moon, only geochemical signatures and tiny nickel-iron sperules.
The as yet unproven hypothesis for the formation of the lunar farside is a very special case, not relevant for normal impacts.
Apollo data is only representative of what it measured--thoroughly mixed impact ejecta regolith, dozens of larger ejecta fragments, and a handful of crustal samples with very little, if any geologic context. This is both a) a small part of the lunar geology story, and b) not relevant to the current discussion about cold traps and impact-deposited ores, both of which we now know are processes the Apollo results shed no light on.
Please read the Apollo papers more carefully. The impact regolith is mixed, but not uniform, it maries from place to place with the dominant signature being the underlying substrate. Geological contacts were diffused, but still recognisable. Every site had its unique site of rocks.
With respect to point a), yes, some of the features of the Apollo samples were indeed local. But it is possible from a suite of ignous rocks to determine global compositions using geochemical patterns, espcially the rare earths. It is from this that the global magma ocean was deduced. So we do know globally that the Moon is etremely depleted in some elements, especially volatile metals like mercury. We also know that at the levels it occurs in Hg is not forming separate phases, so can't be sweated out by the diurn al cycle to move to cold traps.
b) The Apollo samples are entirely relevant to the possibility of impact formed ore bodies. We know from multispectal, X ray and gamma ray data from multiple systems that the polar crust is not that different to that sampled by Luna and Apollo, or in the lunar meteorites (with the exception of of course of the deeper parts of the SPA Basin, which is out of the area of discussion). They are also relevant in that they contain very little water, suggesting that the polar water comes from external sources, such as comets.
Further, the whole point I am trying to make is that the Apollo data is reliable - multiple assays by multiple proven, calibrated techniques. The UV spectoscopy data on Hg, Au, and the rest is one measurement by an ureliable technique, giving results that don't make sense at all.
But that does not seem to be stopping people here creating entire economies out of one crappy result. That isn't even wrong.
For cold traps, look at all the papers that have come out about lunar dust migration and Carle Pieters' lunar hydrologic cycle.
Read them when the first came out (actually got given copies while theywere still embargoed). Nice work. But complete irrelevant to the existence of Au and Hg at the lunar poles, wafting about in the lunar breeze.
For impactor-ore deposits, you need not look any further than Sudbury Basin in Canada, now one of the world's largest supplies of nickel and copper ores. The processes which formed Sudbury Basin certainly occurred on the Moon (and Mars) as well, resulting in large concentrated deposits in the crater rim and floor of impact basins with the right characteristics.
Sigh, this takes me back. It is about the first question anybody asks when they first here that Sudbury is an impact feature. I asked it myself as an undergraduate. And it is quite wrong. There is too much nickel and way too much copper for them to be derived from an impactor. Plus their distribution is quite wrong within the astrobleme itself. The impact was important in generating the high temperature melts that host the mineralisation, but the Ni and Cu are terrestrial. And you don't need an impact to generate large Cu-Ni sulphide deposits - large scale basaltic (Norilsk) or ultramafic volcanism entirely endogenous in origin will suffice.
Mining the Moon is not so crazy when you consider that these relatively pure ores are unaffected by an active geology or hydrologic cycle and weathering, and may lie just a few meters under the surface (this would explain what LCROSS observed). Within cold traps it is likely that small impactors (LCROSS sized) have already excavated quite a bit of ore that would just be sitting there on the surface in bite-sized chunks.
Active geology and weathering are processes that create and improve ore deposits, not the opposite.
Is the difficulty of developing cheap, reliable cislunar transportation really that much harder than digging tunnels 2-3km in the ground as we currently do to get such resources on Earth?
Yes it is. For the cost of a single large lunar orbiter like LRO you can find, prove up and bring to production a world class orebody in just about any commodity you like. It does not matter if Musk is a miracle worker and can reduce costs to a 10th of what they are at present, it will take a lot more than an orbiter to prove up an orebody. Hundreds of drill holes, ground geophysics, thousands of assays, months of test work, getechnical surveys. It will always be easier to do this on Earth.
Lunar mining will be for lunar needs, not terrestrial.
Such as... a human prospecting mission?
I can't imagine the level of investigations required to prove up reserves not being done with human presence. I could be wrong - I understan people are proving up deep sea sulphide deposits with ROVs and other remotely controlled insturments, although I think there is some use of crewed submersibles too.
JonClarke wrote:I don't believe there is significant gold or mercury in lunar craters. Not without good evidence.
JonClarke wrote:...I can't stress strongly enough that I would believe the Apollo data over the LCROSS dat when it comes to the heavier elements. The Apollo data is validated by hundreds of analyses using different methods. The LCROSS data is a single analysis that can't be trusted to give meaningful results for heavier elements. UV spectroscopy is great for volatitles, useless for anything else.
Those numbers are rediculous. Several analyses of the target material with similar results by trustworthy methods - XRF, APX, ICPMS - would be a sifferent matter...First of all Apollo never went to permenently shadowed regens so how could they have data about them? And the data it did bring back seems to corroborate LCROSS. Coreing samples where taken up to three meters deep, the upper most portions of those samples had depleted levels of gold but the lower samples did not. There is a theory that the gold particles electrostatically repel themselves much farther than other elements after being struck by micro meteors and that they would accumulate in cold traps. Mercury should accumulate for obvious reasons just like water.
The apollo sample suite is sufficiently diverse to allow calculation of global and crustal abudnances. It is back up by the Luna samples and the lunar meteorites. The Moon is very strongly depleted in Hg, and other volatile metals. That does not preclude local concentrations but does make them unlikely. That's the first point.
Secondly, as I said before, UV spectoscopy is not a reliable tool for measuring heavy elements. To draw far reaching conclusions, as is happening here, based on one quite possibly spurious reading from an unreliable instrument, completely unwarranted.
What's the evidence for gold distribution in the lunar regolith? Whosde theory is it about electrostatic mobiliation? Is it published? Is their any experimental evidence? Becausde it seems extremely unlikely. Gold is not common in lunar rocks either, and does not occur as descrete grains but dispersed in other minerals.
As I have already said, Hg would only be concentrated "like water" if it could be volatilised out of the rocks. This requires it to exist as a separate metallic phase (or possibly sulphide). There is not enough Hg in the rocks for this, it is locked up in the silicates. It just isn' going to happen.
Certainly there needs to be more exploration before you start sending mining equipment, but just ignoring the evidence we do have is rather irresponsible. I know there are allot of mars fans out there who wish everyone would pretend like the moon doesn't exist and deem it as a distraction. I am just the opposite I think the moon is necessary for the future of life. We can do allot of science on mars by going direct but if you want to get serous about colonization things can happen much more quickly if we have a large profitable enterprise that can fund the development of space infrastructure and get the launch rate up.
Crap data is not evidence, it is just... crap. No degree of wishful thinking maks it otherwise.
The comment about Mars is a completely irrelevant to the case. This isn't one of the pointless Moon vs Mars argumen ts. This is a matter of evaluating the evidence and understanding the technology.
I think platinum groups are a good possibility, the moon is a big place and its been there for a long time; bound to have been some low speed impacts of platinum bearing asteroids every once in a while. But that sort of mining is relatively small scale compared to what an abundant supply of gold could sustain.
There is no evidence that impacts produce PGE concentrations. The mixing ratios of impactor and target materials is just too high.
There is a whole ecological angle too. Mining on earth damages the environment, on the moon there are no endangered species to protect. Imagine a future where gold is autonomously mined and kinetically shot back to earth. So abundant that your grandchildren will wire there homes with it and find it amusing that it was once so valuable.
Since there is no reliable evidence that there is abundant gold on the Moon this is just wishful thinking. And what makes you think it could be mned more cheap on the Moon than on than on Earth?
BTW properly done, terrestrial mining has minimal evironmental impact.
Such arguments don't advance the case for lunar development. Rather the opposite.
Jon, tremendously difficult is an infinity away from impossible. Even the largest project can come into being if either a) we attack it piecemeal with liquidity steps along the way, or b) risk is sufficiently reduced so as to make enough funding available..
Agreed.
Elon's grand vision is not to make inexpensive, reliable rockets for the commercial satellite, civil space, and military industries--It's to put homesteads on Mars. But if it's 2004 and your goal is to put homesteads on Mars, cheap, reliable access to space is both on the critical path and a profitable business to be in. Now it's 2011 and we can (almost) put a check mark next to cheap access to space. So what's next on the critical path?
That is the vision of most people interested in space. But SpaceX has to make money. It isn't going to do so with that vision.
As for cheap access to space, I don't think Musk has achieved that. He certainly hasn't demonstrated much reliability. At launch costs are a red herring. The real cost of spaceflight is the hardware. Unless spacecraft become cheaper launch costs are a ery minor part of the equation.
Good on him for what he has done, but I don't think he walks on water like so many people seem to think.
Jon, if you would like to debate this further, I'd like to have your opinion on what the necessary steps to building a free-market interplanetary economy including self-sufficient (or at least trade-positive) human habitation on the Moon and Mars. If we then look at those steps which are doable in 4-5 years with an eye towards the critical path, I'm certain we'll find a dozen or so profitable businesses.
I don't know, and neither does anybody else. Trying to imagine the interplanetary economy that would allow economically viable settlement is like Janszoon trying to work out how Australia could be ecoomically viable in 1606. He had not the slightest idea. It's baby steps.
The next step is to clearly build commerical human-related space flight in Earth orbit. Energia and Space Adventures are already doing it, Virgin, Orbital, and Space X are within a year or to of doing it (hopefully). While that is happening, for government research to map continue to map the Moon, especially with respect to volatiles. ISRU is going to be important for any lunar stations, and we can conceive of future markets, even if neither they nor the infrastructure exist. All those wizzkids of newspace can also try to bring down the cost and complexity of space hardware.
Beyond that its armwaving!
In the absence of a hydraulic cycle it is entirely possible that metallic ores from asteroidal impacts stay resident at their impact site indefinitely. If Cabeus or a neighboring crater were the result of an impact from a metal-rich asteroid, the LCROSS results would make perfect sense.
Apollo is not a very trustworthy guide to the geology of the moon with respect to mineral prospecting. The "deep" drills used in the later missions were only to a depth of 3m--and almost entirely composed of regolith/impact ejecta. That could not be more different than the geology of permanently shadowed crater floors in the poles.
As to the accuracy of the LCROSS results, I know many of core team personally through my work and have attended almost all of their science briefings. They are very dedicated scientists, and with support from the entire Ames center have done a thorough job in isolating possible contamination and accounting for instrument anomalies (including multiple practical tests at the vertical gun range, so it's not just theoretical either). I would trust their data.
That's not to say that one can extrapolate LCROSS results to the rest of the Moon, or even just the rest of Cabeus. But the results are definitely real, and part of the larger story.
Even a metallic asteroid is so dispersed during the impact process that ores do not result, not even of the most adundant elements.
I know only one of the LCROSS team well, but I too have the highest regard for them. But this does not mean that UV spectroscopy gives meaningful results for heavy element abundances. Please present some hard evidence to the contrary.
I am sorry, but in what way are the Apollo samples not trustworthy as a guide to mineral prspecting? Apart from the obvious with respect to volatites.? What evidence do you have that the polar rocks are funadmentally different from those we have seen already? What is the relevence for the drill depth?
JonClarke wrote:2) Concentration of gold and mercury in shadowed craters is extremely unlikely -there is not mechanism to do so.
Mercury can easily sublimate into a gas. Therefore it amenable to accumulation in the cold traps.
Only in the metallic form. Not when it is locked up in silicates. And lunar rocks have very low Hg - less than 0.3 parts per billion. That is less than 1% of the average abunance in terrestrial cust.
I'm thinking of putting rovers on rollers to give the effect of travelling distance and then at the "arrival point" moving into a smaller chamber for "EVA" activity eg.. getting out and taking some rock samples with a drill or mining ice.
You could do that to test the technology. In terms of human factors research it would need o be linked to high level VR. Which is what the IBMP people are working on.
Jon - Which of the following do you claim will NOT make money from Mars on the first mission? -
1. Sale of regolith and meteorites returned to Earth.
2. Commercial sponsorship of the Mission and various elements within the mission.
3. Sale of artefacts used by first humans on Mars on return to Earth.
4. Sale of TV and film rights.
5. Sale of science data and specialist film etc to Universities and other space agencies on return to Earth.
I'd put the total at well over 1 billion dollars for the first mission. There is no reason to put off the start of making money from Mars.
Unless the mission costs less than a billion these won't make money.
So... we're quite certain there's abundant CHON at the Lunar poles? Sounds good to me. The absence of Gold does not mean we can't build a viable Lunar infrastructure, it just means we have to look elsewhere for profit, such as the KREEP.
I think it is certain there are abundant volatiles at the poles. More work is needed on how to do this - the detailed composition, the processing, how to operate in darkness and very low temperatures etc. But probably we can make a station self sufficient.
Exporting volatiles, that is a different story. You need a market, a business model, and a whole slew of new technology. Plus you need to operate everything on a much larger scale. It is possible, but not yet.
How on earth would you make a profit from KREEP?
I see no reason why we can't construct a proper Mars analogue facility - a large sealed hangar with 6 metres of Mars analogue soil, the right pressure and atmospheric contents, and a controlled sol cycle at the right seasonal intensity - all with wall projections to simulate the landscape. It would cost hundreds of millions of dollars but it would providse usable data.
Small chambers like this already exist. Chambers large enough to test large spacecaft also exist, these could probably be adapted to simulate the Mars surface (pumping them down might a challenge though). They would play a vital role in testing equipment.
But could could not make one large enough to support a sustained EVA campaign. Even not pressured Mars floors can only with difficulty be made large enough. The Mars 500 one was too small. Even a converted sports field would only be large enough to support a couple full scale pedestrialn EVAs.
To simulate long range EVAs with pressurised vehciles duing a long stay Mars mission you would have to go to some reasonably analogue terrain - the Sahara, the Atacama, central Australia, Devon Island, parts of Antarctica, and accept the limitations.
If it was a high fidelity simulation you could still have a pressurised habitat and suits. The main issues would icluding maintain fidelity during the changing seasons and security.
Well,
drilling is needed to reach deeper layers of the sediments to look into the history of the planet, but to harvest the obviously existing sources of water for in situ use, it is only necessary to scratch the overlaying sands off the permafrost sites to reach the water ice.(like the PHOENIX tools) Put a bubble or dome over the site, get the air inside warmed up by the sun, and bring the air like a waterhose at high temperature in close contact at the regolith/water mix. Then crack the upcoming gases of CO2 and H2O in the bubble by controlling the cooling, and separate water and Co2. Such a rack could be moved by a trekking vehicle.Just an idea, not very much founded by my limited knowledge of any of these technologies.
Could that be made working??
Actually, you don't need to drill to reach deeper layers of sediments, they are exposed by topography. You drill to test buried targets, or to sample material unaffected by syrface processes.
Your idea could work, in principle. The issue would be the rate it would work at. It could probably be tsted in a small pressure chamber.
Three questions:
1) That's been done to stop this happening again?
2) What is being done gto assure good backups?
3) Any chance of posts later than 2008 ever coming back?
I have certainly mentioned it on the facebook page. Lot's of interesting discussion, by people who did not used to post here. Of course like all Facebook discussion it is too brief, too hard to keep track of, and too ephemeral.
There are ways you can immediately make money; you just have to be creative about it. Virgin Galactic is oversold on seats. I've sat in on some Space Angels network pitch sessions, and seen quite a few entrepreneurs raising money for pretty unique ideas. MoonEx has been semi-public about their intention to strip-mine polar craters--I'm not privy to their economic and geologic modeling, but it has apparently been good enough to convince some high-caliber investors. I'm working on my own varient of that space that solves the chicken-egg problem and eliminates the need to bring refined material back to earth.
Ballistic flights and even LEO are not the same as the Moon and Mars.
Mining the Moon? Possible, but a long way off. First we need to determine whether the resources are there. Remote sensing and one analysis is not enough. You will need ground geophysics, hundreds of drill holes, thousands of analyses. You need to develop the processing system, from bench top to pilot plant to full scale production. You then have to develop the transport infrastructure. All this on the Moon, in a part of the Moon quite different from the places we have worked in. both with astronauts and robots, in the past. All this assumes that there is a market for the commodity you produce and you can sell it competitively.
In the exploration terminology, a huge amount of precompetive surveying needs to be done, and a lot of R&D. Not to mention development of technology, infrastructure and experience in living and working in the environment.
Is this worth investigating? Sure. But don't expect it to happen in the next few decades. If there is any lunar mining it will almost certainly grow out of and be upscaled from base support ISRU.
The difference between entrepreneurialism and fraud is sometimes very subtle.
There are no shortage of workable ideas. The problem is when you assume that things must be done as they've always been done, with incremental improvements and the same funding sources. That is how big business and industry work, but industries can and often are transformed overnight by disruptive entrepreneurs.
And 9 out 10 startups fail. Lunar mining isn't a geek in closet developing few software, or a country girl and her boyfriend and his cousin mining a gold find in the backblocks. It isn't like some 50s SF novel, with a bunch of ex-scouts and the neighbourhood tinkerer coming up with a backyard spaceship that takes them to the Moon. It is hard and difficult. Not because the government makes it hard, but because basic physics and chemistry and geology do.
Maybe my viewpoint is a litte different having grown up in Silicon Valley during the start, boom, crash, and rebirth of the internet business. But I've also worked at NASA and seen the other side. Human exploration was driven by military and geopolitical needs until the rundown of Apollo. Government spending was needed to keep research alive and knowledge intact until such time as private industry could set its own course. That time is now. There is still a hugely important role for NASA in funding the development of new technologies and acting as an investor of last resort in worthwhile ventures.
That explains a lot. But Silicon Valley is only a very small sector of the business world. I spent more that a decade in mineral exploration. I have looked for half a dozen commodities on three continents and in the coean as well. I know how tough it is to bring deposits on stram on Earth, let alone on the Moon. And I also know how much easier and cheaper it is to do here. Pus I have also worked for the government, taught at university, and done time as NASA contactor. So I have an some understanding of the symbiotic role of government and industry, between academia and the commerical world.
If you haven't seen it already, I recommend watching Hoyt Davidson's talk at Newspace 2011, which is a summary of his company's report to NASA to the same effect.
Yawn. Preaching to the choir. Sorry.
PS I pushing this point a little hard because there are some smart, young kids here with promising careers that with some ingenuity could be co-founders of the companies that take us there for good. Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, but I want you to know that it is an option. For far too long the Mars Society stance has been too focused on the government option. We lobby every new president and candidate that comes in, then when either he or the congress doesn't deliver we wait until the next cycle begins. Well, that hasn't been working, and there is another way out.
Perceptions differ. The US society was started by people with strong "Newspace" connections. Most people in the society I know still seem to think that going to Mars is easy, it is only the evil goverment that stops us, if only the pure genius of the corporate sector, untrammeled by supposed waste and inefficiency and corruption of government, were allowed to flourish, we could be on Mars by the end of the decade. The US society has been looking for "another way out" as you put it, for more than a decade. Number of purely private probes launched beyond Earth orbit in that time? Zero. Number of space agency probes that have left Earth orbit? Close to forty.
Why? Because the private sector is rightly focussing on Earth orbit, where the money is. Eventually, when we know enough about the Moon and Mars, there will be money to be made there. But the private sector isn't even interested in collecting the data to make that possible. They payoff is too far down the track. When Rio Tinto or BHP, Xtrata or Anglo-American, Exon, Shell or BP start start funding lunar volatile exploration, then we will be on the verge of commerical space exploration
I don't wish to sound harsh - if valuable data was obtained it will no doubt be used in the future. However, I can't help but remain sceptical about that.
I think that once a consortium to land humans on Mars is put together, such testing will be undertaken, but on a much closer Mars analogue (atmosphere,temperature, sol cycle, soil and so on). In my view it would be worth spending a few hundred million dollars to built a Mars replica site (as well as an MTV simulator). But you can't do it on the cheap is my view. Obviously an ISS simulation would be quite realistic for the transit, so I wouldn't mark that down.
You don't sound harsh, only ignorant. I don't want that to sound harsh either. You show no signs of havig done any background investigation into the true scale and sophistication of this experiment, not into the reasons why such experiments are done.
Mars 500 did simulation the conditions of a Mars mission as accurately as possible. A realistic crew, living on realistic food, in realistic quarters, do real science, supported by a realistic life support, with real and virtual isolation, is a good simulation to allow a wide range of issues to be explored. It's an experiment.
The Mars landing side of things was not the purpose of the simulation, but they did that as well as could be expected for a first attempt under the set up constrains. Their use of telerobotics and virtual reality was most interesting. I am fairly sure they did operate under Mars time while "on the surface".
As to doing a high fidelity simulation of the landing component of a long stay, we are a long way from that, and it probably would be impratical. Aspects of it certainly could be simulated and tested, as has been done at MDRS, FMARS, HMP, Svalbard, and Desert RATS. I think long stay missions at low to moderate fidelity simulations could be sustained at FMARS or HMP, this would be quite useful.
As I am very sure we will go back to the Moon before we go to Mars, I sustepct that long stays on the lunar surface would be the best preparation.
I suppose one could argue that the LCROSS results are not indicative of the rest of the Moon, which is definitely an argument that could be made based on the presence of all of those rare metals, which were largely speaking not found in the samples taken from Apollo. For the concentration of lunar soil, I look to the JSC-1 Lunar Soil Simulant, which should be of very similar composition to the surface of the Moon. According to NASA, JSC-1 is "a glass-rich basaltic ash which approximates the chemical composition, mineralogy, particle size distribution, and engineering properties of lunar mare soil." Next to it, a representative sample of the composition of lunar soil is given. Both are fairly similar. Now, compare this to the ejecta spewed up by LCROSS: Of elements found by LCROSS but not found in the lunar soils returned by Apollo:
3.1% Zinc
2.4% Vanadium
1.6% Gold
1.2% Mercurcy
This totals 8.3% of the material discovered by LCROSS; this is just in elements found in the crater which were not found in the Apollo samples. If the water found there is of meteoric origin, I would expect to find these in the Apollo samples, or at least the ones from craters. To my knowledge no such finds have been made. If it originates from the solar wind, I would also expect to find these metals across the planet, which they are not (further, I would expect to find them in much lower quantities compared to the amount of hydrogen and helium). Now, unless there is something about the poles of the Moon which attract meteorites more than the rest of the planet does, a hypothesis which seems dubious to me, either the LCROSS probe observed something that was not truly found in the soil (contamination from the impactor? Selective ejection of these elements for some reason?), the crater it impacted was very different from what would normally be expected to be found at the lunar poles.
I'm not a scientist, but I don't think I've gone far wrong in any of this. Have any of the planetary geologists looking at the LCROSS data addressed this difference in composition compared to the fairly well known composition of Lunar regolith elsewhere on the Moon?
Josh
I can't stress strongly enough that I would believe the Apollo data over the LCROSS dat when it comes to the heavier elements. The Apollo data is validated by hundreds of analyses using different methods. The LCROSS data is a single analysis that can't be trusted to give meaningful results for heavier elements. UV spectroscopy is great for volatitles, useless for anything else.
Those numbers are rediculous. Several analyses of the target material with similar results by trustworthy methods - XRF, APX, ICPMS - would be a sifferent matter.
You ask if any scientists have looked at this. I am a planetary scientist (admittedly Mars) with more than a decade experie4nce in the exploration industry looking for a range of commodities including gold. There are some largish holes in the ground in Google Earth that are at least in part my responsibility. So when I think these results are almost certaonly spurious, I think I have some basis for that opinion.
I also find the silence of th mission scientists on these results telling. They quoted them, but did not discuss them, the mostly likely explanation for this is, IMHO, because they think they are spurious.
LCROSS is not good evidence? That was direct observation.
No, LCROSS was not good evidence for gold and mercury. Why not?
1) They were detected by UV spectroscopy in the ejecta plume. To the best of my knowledge this is not a good method to detect these elements, only volatiles.
2) Concentration of gold and mercury in shadowed craters is extremely unlikely -there is not mechanism to do so.
3) The possibility of contamination cannot be ruled out. There was certainly gold on the spacecraft, I don't know if there was mercury.
4) The sole paper mentioning these elements does not discuss them, suggesting that the authors don't trust the results
So we have people building entire imaginary industries on the basis of a single, highly unreliable analysis on possibly contaminated material. If you tried to do that in the real world you might well end up in jail.
I don't believe there is significant gold or mercury in lunar craters. Not without good evidence.
this is where we fundamentally disagree. There are fully viable business plans today that will open the space frontier, and many of them are getting funded. There has been a critical change in the last 2-3 years, due IMO primarily to SpaceX and the X-Prize foundation that has cleared away the last obstacles to private enterprise in space. Since the 70's there have been viable business plans for opening up the space frontier. Since the 90's we have had the technology and experience to actually do so. Only recently has the perception, funding climate, and base costs also changed enough that all the stars are now in alignment. The time for space enterprise is now.
All being well we will indeed see in the next few years increased commerical activity with respect to crewed missions to Earth orbit and suborbitally. This is an indeed opening of a commerical frontier. But only because the hard technical work has been done by government agencies, generating technolgies they can use and develop, because the agencies have facilities in orbit they want cargo and personenel shipped to and are prepared for the service. There is also the continued development of space tourism. None of which inevitable of course. Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Orbital are all years behinf schedule. Bigelow has laid off most of its staff. Kistler went belly up.
Even if all goes well, none of which will lead to commerical operations pioneering the way to the Moon or Mars. The commerical operations will of course generate a greater pool of expertise and technology and even hardware which can be applied to getting to Mars.
But they will not go themselves unless they can make money out of it, nor should they. Since there is nothing on Mars or even the Moon to immediately make money from, the only way commerical entities will go to Mars is if someone pays them. As they have done. EADS-Astrium have gone to Mars - they built Mars Express. So have Lockheed-Martin - they built Phoenix. So are Honeybee Robotics (built tools for the MERs), and a dozen other companies.
Policy and economics are linked, but so many others.
Policy I think, tends to be about what countries are doing now, or will be doing in the future, or we think should be doing.
An economic subforum would enable people to discuss how a Mars settlement (or even initial missions) could become economically viable
