Did God just pee on the Moon?
NASA's data about Moon rock composition over the last 40 years has been very consistent. The non-polar regions of the Moon are dry, desiccated, dead. Until yesterday. NASA announced that data from the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbitor indicates that there is a relative abundance of lunar water - even in areas exposed to the Sun's rays. At 750 parts per million, a ton of lunar rock would yield about a litre of water. Helpful for future missions.
But, how on earth did NASA get this so wrong for the last 40 years? The Apollo astronauts brought back piles of Moon rocks, many of which were analysed for water. Traces were found at the time, but NASA claimed that "most of the boxes containing the lunar samples leaked which led scientists to assume traces of water found came from Earth air that had entered the containers". 750ppm is not a trace. And how about the boxes which did not leak? What of the water composition in them?
Then there are the NASA probes in the late 1990s,which deliberately set out to discover water on the Moon. They found frozen water in deep polar craters. But Clementine, and particularly Prospector, were set up with spectrometers capable of detecting water across the surface. How did they miss it? They certainly shouldn't have! Here's the Mission guidelines for Prospector's spectrometers:
"Lunar Prospector (LP), which was launched on January 6, 1998, carries an integrated suite of three spectrometers. A Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (GRS) and a Neutron Spectrometer (NS) are providing global maps of the major and trace elemental composition of the lunar surface, with special emphasis on the search for polar water-ice deposits, implied by the H abundance...Global mapping of elemental abundances by the LP GRS and NS will impose major new constraints on the bulk composition of the lunar crust, on compositional variations over the lunar surface, and on the existence of lunar resources including polar water ice" (2) [my emphasis]
The map opposite shows Prospector data from 1998 (3), which has still not been properly peer-reviewed over ten years on, according to the PDS website (4). The equatorial map indicates that a fairly detailed, surface wide analysis was undertaken. So - it begs the question: Why is the Indian data (and also Deep Impact data, we learn) so radically different? How is it that 40 years of scientific opinion about Moon soil and rock composition has been so fundamentally overturned? Did God just pee on the Moon? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the data that NASA has been making public for the last 40 years?
Written by Andy Lloyd, 25/9/09, author of 'The Dark Star' and 'Ezekiel One'
References:
1) Claire Bates "'Widespread water' found on the Moon, opening the way for man to live there full-time" Daily Mail, 24/9/09