 На Луне обнаружены крупные запасы воды. Это открытие официально
подтверждает американское аэрокосмическое агентство NASA, как сообщает CBS NEWS Coverage of Breaking Space News NASA.
«Я собрал вас здесь сегодня, чтобы сообщить, что мы нашли воду на
Луне. И речь не идет о подтверждении ее присутствия — мы нашли очень
значительные объемы воды», — заявил один из ученых NASA Энтони Колаприт
(Anthony Colaprete) на пресс-конференции. По его словам, наличие воды подтверждает предварительная информация,
полученная в результате эксперимента, проведенного NASA в начале
октября. Тогда, напомним, специалисты провели намеренное столкновение
космического аппарата с поверхностью Луны в районе кратера Кабеус, от
удара поднялся столб лунной пыли высотой в несколько десятков
километров. Сквозь это облако пролетел еще один аппарат, который и
собрал данные о содержащихся в нем частицах. По словам Колаприта,
только в созданном ими столбе пыли они обнаружили около 100 литров воды. «Эта находка открывает новую главу в изучении Луны», — заявляют в NASA.
По словам главы отдела NASA по исследованиям Луны Майкла Варго (Michael
Wargo), есть несколько версий происхождения воды на естественном
спутнике Земли — солнечный ветер, кометы, гигантские молекулярные
облака и даже внутренние процессы на Луне. Он отметил, что Земля также
может иметь отношение к появлению воды на Луне. «Если запасы воды на Луне сформировались миллиарды лет назад и
держались, как в ловушке, на полюсах спутника, в них может содержаться
ключевая информация об истории создания и эволюции солнечной системы,
так же как и лед на полюсах Земли обладает информацией об истории
планеты», — говорит Варго. Он добавляет, что наличие больших объемов
воды серьезно расширяет возможности по созданию постоянной лунной базы.
Дополнительные материалы:
LCROSS detects water ice on moon
BS NEWS Coverage of Breaking Space News NASA.
07:40 PM, 11/13/09, Update: LCROSS impact kicks up water ice on moon
Making a bigger splash than expected, the crash of an empty rocket
stage in a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole last
month kicked up a surprising amount of water ice and vapor, confirming
the presence of a potentially valuable resource for future space
travelers.
"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water," said
Anthony Colaprete, the project scientist and principal investigator for
the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. "And we didn't find
just a little bit, we found a significant amount."
Holding up water jugs to make the point, he said "if you remember, a
month ago we were talking?about teaspoons going into glasses over
football fields. Well, now I can say today that in the 20- to 30-meter
(65- to 100-foot-wide) crater LCROSS made, we found maybe about a dozen
of these two-gallon buckets worth of water."
And more than water. Data from the LCROSS instruments show signs of other compounds that may shed light on the moon's evolution.
"It's a whole lot more beyond the water," Colaprete said. "That's the
exciting part in my mind, it's not only about the water now. There's
actually a lot more here that we're going to be talking about in the
months ahead, looking at the LCROSS data."
Said Greg Delory, a researcher at the University of California,
Berkeley: "This is not your father's moon. Rather than a dead and
unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting
one that could tell us unique things about the Earth-moon system and
the early solar system."
Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in
Washington, said the discovery holds promise for future exploration.
Using solar energy, future astronauts could, in theory, break down
recovered ice and in effect live off the land.
"Water can be used for the kind of things we think about every day,
drinking water if we have extended crews on the surface," he said. "You
can break it down and have breathable air for crews to breathe. But
also, if you have significant quantities of this stuff, water really is
the constituents of one of the most potent rocket fuels: oxygen and
hydrogen."
Whether the water ice detected by LCROSS might be accessible to future
astronauts remains to be seen. But scientists were elated with the
initial findings.
The $79 million LCROSS mission was launched June 18 as a companion
payload to NASA's $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.
Working in a 31-mile-high orbit, LRO is designed to create a
high-resolution map of the moon's surface to help identify sites for
future manned missions.
It also is measuring the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar
explorers will face and mapping out the surface topology, mineralogy
and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be
spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely
scientific observations.
While LRO was launched directly to the moon by an Atlas 5 rocket,
LCROSS and the booster's empty Centaur upper stage were sent into a
looping four-month orbit back around the Earth.
The spacecraft aimed itself and the attached Centaur stage back at the
moon, targeting a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. Data
from previous spacecraft indicated the presence of hydrogen in the
polar regions, possibly associated with water ice just below the
surface.
LCROSS mission managers initially selected a target crater known as
Cabeus A, but after additional analysis of topographic data, the target
was switched to nearby Cabeus, a crater measuring some 62 miles across
and about two-and-a-half miles deep.
LCROSS successfully separated from the Centaur stage the night before
impact, rotated 180 degrees to aim its instruments forward and then
followed its doomed companion to the surface, trailing it by about four
minute.
The Centaur is believed to have hit the moon within about 650 feet of
the planned target, blasting out a crater 65 feet to 100 feet across.
Colaprete showed photographs from LCROSS Friday that clearly showed the
plume of debris kicked up by the crash. Another photo showed the crater
itself. LCROSS flew through the ejecta cloud, collecting data all the
while, before crashing a short distance away.
The Centaur impact was not particularly impressive to the untrained eye
- a pinpoint flash of light in the inky darkness of the crater's
shadowed terrain - and many observers, expecting a more dramatic show
as indicated in NASA animations, were disappointed.
But Colaprete said Friday the impact more than lived up to scientific
expectations. Spectroscopic data from two instruments aboard LCROSS
clearly showed the presence of water ice, along with a variety of other
materials, in the ejecta plume.
"We can constrain right now how much water we think is in the field of
view of our instrument," he said. "Based on these measurements, there
is more than 100 kilograms in the field of view of our instrument. What
does that mean, a hundred kilograms? That's the dozen or so two-gallon
buckets I described.
"But what we need to do next is take all the information, the amount of
ejecta, the size of the crater, how this all changed over time and
actually reconstruct the entire event, understand how it all fits back
into the ground along with all the other things we've seen in the
ejecta plume to really understand this whole thing."
Delory said more analysis will be needed to figure out where the water ice originated.
"One possible source of the water is from comets," he said. "If that's
true, and the lunar polar regions really are repositories for this
material, they are a literal treasure trove of information in terms of
the composition of comets, which are themselves indicative of early
solar system conditions. That would be of extreme interest to many
planetary scientists."
Another possibility, he said, is that the water ice is the result of
chemical reactions that start with the solar wind, "which is basically
an ionized gas streaming from the sun composed mainly of hydrogen."
"It impacts the lunar surface, undergoes chemistry, eventually these
molecules hop around the moon and end up concentrated around the
poles," he said. "Studying those deposits would tell us something about
solar history, also about the history of chemical reactions occurring
on the surface of the moon. Two completely different theories, we don't
know which one is right yet."
Other sources are also possible, he said, including deposits from
molecular clouds the solar system may have passed through earlier in
its evolution as well as subtle chemical processes on the moon itself.
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