Wow. A lot of water at both poles, with some strong signatures, with spacial variability in large craters.
I’m recording it, and I haven’t watched the whole thing, but apparently it’s at all latitudes, but they were looking more at the poles, and it’s more abundant there.
[Update at noon]
Keith Cowing has notes from the event.
Rand,
Yes, it make the Moon looks even more attractive for settlement and development.
Tom
Woah!
That bumps up the priority for developing in-situ resource utilization and libration orbit fuel depots. If there is plentiful water on the moon, that’s potential rocket fuel on the surface and in orbit.
1 quart of water for a every baseball diamond sized area of regolith. Get your gloves on, we got a lot of raking to do.
So Andy Williams was right.
Moon river, wider than a mile — I’m crossing you in style, some day…
A liter of water per ton sounds like a good bit more than a quart per baseball diamond.
But if its only in a thin layer of the surface, you have to scrape up a bit to get a ton.
Will never happen. The Gaian dirt worshippers will require years of “Impact Statements” on how this will all affect the lunar environment. And you can be sure they’ll find some sort of fish or toad or bacterium that can be declared to be “endangered” to stop any mining operation.
So roasting a 1000 ton of regolith in a solar oven might yield 100kg of hydrogen and 10 ton of oxygen. Doing this once a month would require a solar mirror around 10m in diameter, plus a ~30kW thermodynamic engine running off the solar oven to power the electrolysis. This would enable around 2-3 ton of payload to LLO per month (lean mix). Scale from there.
But if its only in a thin layer of the surface, you have to scrape up a bit to get a ton.
The IR measurements only sense a thin layer, That doesn’t mean water is confined to just that layer.