Now here’s an interesting subject. Scientists have suspected for the last couple years that the moon had very significant amounts of frozen water stored underground and in craters. One of the limiting factors to space colonization is H2O since it serves a dual purpose: water for human/mechanical consumption and being split for the hydrogen and oxygen components that are used to fuel rockets.

Andrea Thompson, Senior Editor of SPACE.com reports:

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.

Snip …

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.

We need to keep something else in mind here. Water on the moon could be more valuable than anything else in the solar system over time. Besides water, there’s another limiting factor to human colonization of space: $10,000/pound.

That’s what’s required to send something from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit. Earth Escape Velocity is (if memory serves) about 11.2 km/s. That makes human colonization of the solar system VERY expensive.

That may not sound like much, but the moon’s escape velocity is only 2.4 km/s and would make things MUCH less expensive and we’d be able to ramp up solar system exploration and colonization a lot more rapidly.

It’s either factories on space stations in Earth/Lunar orbit or factories on a moon base. There really aren’t a whole lot of other options if we’re ever going to get out there.

Godspeed my friends!

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• Probe found water on the moon (msnbc.msn.com)
• ‘Large amounts’ of water on Moon (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Water Discovery Fuels Hope to Colonize the Moon (space.com)
• ‘Significant Amount’ of Water Found on Moon (space.com)
• NASA’s Moon-Crashing Spacecraft Gets New Crater Target (space.com)
• NASA Scientists Report That They Found Water On The Moon (pinkisthenewblog.com)
• Moon Orbiter Beams Home Images of Lunar Crashes (space.com)

Your humble moderator will grant you that it’ll take a significant amount of time, but the results of this one ought to be spectacular.

Science now reports:

It’s large, it’s fast, and it’s heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation. In fact, the cloud contains enough gas to form a million stars like our sun, astronomers reported here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding also indicates that pristine material is still entering the relatively mature Milky Way.

Many clouds of hydrogen surround the Milky Way. But astronomers didn’t start spotting them until a half-century ago–after the advent of radio telescopes, which are able to detect cold, neutral hydrogen gas. The early observations were not accurate enough to determine the clouds’ distances, masses, or directions of motion, however.

Now, thanks to more powerful telescopes such as the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, these clouds are finally getting their close-up. The first to be spotlighted in extreme detail is Smith’s Cloud, named after Dutch astronomy student Gail Smith, who discovered it in 1963. Curious about the cloud’s elongated shape, a team of astronomers led by Felix “Jay” Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, took tens of thousands of radio brightness measurements. The data reveal that the cloud is just 8000 light-years away from the Milky Way’s central plane, making it the closest one known. Its cometary shape is apparently due to the tidal effects of the Milky Way.

According to this astronomy article, there should be some spectacuar fireworks when this gas cloud gets incorporated into the Milky Way, creating tens of thousand of massive clouds millions of years into the future. It’s going to be some kind of light show.

This comes under the wowsers category. Halfway back to the big bang, a short gamma ray burst 100 times more powerful than most.

Science Daily reports:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.

“This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder,” says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.

GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.

The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.

Your humble moderator is continually awed by the findings in astronomy that we’re making. From gravity to cosmology, relativity to the life of black holes, some of the most remarkable advances being made in science and technology are being made in astronomy, though this may change in the future with the growth of biology and chemistry.

“The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.”

Since it’s inception in 2002, the Universal Library (www.ulib.org) has been busily scanning books and manuscripts, both out-of-print and contemporary. The books are available in 20 different languages and represent about 1% of the worlds books.

One possible problem is that your humble moderator went in for a quick peek and chose to browse their astronomy listings. The listings started with books starting with A of course, but back to 1894. However there are options that allow searching and the are also categorized in 50 year increments to locate the information you’re looking for more easily.

One has to wonder where this will end up in the future. How many times have sci-fi authors dreamed over the years of having the knowledge of humanity’s science and technology computerized and available for instant access.

I guess the moral here is: Beware information overload in 1.5 million books

I wanted to find something big and spectacular for my first posting to this blog and this story seems to fit both bills. It’s as big as anything I can think of that science has come up with so far and your humble moderator’s mind keeps trying to wrap itself around it, and of course, failing.

The New Scientist website reported on 24 August 2007 that there’s a void in space, 6 to 10 billion light years from Earth that stretches across a billion empty light years of absolute nothingness from the direction of the constellation Eridanus. According to Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, there are no radio waves coming from this area of space, meaning no galaxies, no super clusters, stars or even dark matter, though he seems to think that this is confirmation of dark energy in the universe.

But another team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the incredible void may be the imprint of another universe on our own. Also reported in New Scientist, on 24 November 2007, Laura Mersini-Houghton and her team infer that this might also vindicate string theory.

According to the New Scientist article, “In string theory, 10500 universes (or string vacuums) are described, each with unique properties. They contend that the largeness of our universe is due to its vacuum counterbalancing gravity. This counter-gravity of the vacuum keeps our universe very large (rather than shrinking due to gravity)—larger than the other multitude of universes. The team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of this interaction they are seen by us.”

This is one reason to watch astronomy closely in the future and we’ll try to keep a close eye on it on this blog. A billion light years across. wowser.

What can your moderator say? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs.

Greetings folks!

My name is Dean and I’m your humble blog moderator. I’ve always been fascinated in Science and Technology and it seems that for years now, areas of research have been gaining momentum at warp speed which is fascinating in itself. Though I’m not a scientist and don’t even play one on TV, I love the turns that science and technology are taking and want to share some of my more interesting findings of a SciTech nature with others.
I saw it put best years ago in, I dunno, some old magazine I ran across. “The augmentation of the intellect of man.” That’s what I’m after. I’d already been in the computer biz for quite a few years, but now watching nanotechnology taking shape and watching the discoveries of both outer and inner space that are taking place, I can’t for the life of me think of a better time to be alive.

Be warned however, that this is likely to be a hodgepodge of different subjects, astronomy, gadgets and gizmo’s, nanotechnology, chemistry, medicine, who knows. Whatever piques my interest is likely to end up here.

So sit back with a cup of java and let’s relax in each others company as we watch the human future unfold before us.

Dean