The Moon is as wet as Earth

[DavidU (Dave)]

A very very interesting find.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/tech-news/a...-wet-as-earth/

[astroron (Ron)]

Very interesting article David
Some strong conclusions held there, it will be interesting if other researchers come to the same conclusion
Cheers

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Same

[gary]

Hi David,

Thanks for the link. Great article. Certainly one of those "Who would have thought?" stories.

I was fascinated by the lines in the space.com article that David had provided the link
for where it said -

Originally Posted by space.com

But co-author Thomas Weinreich, at the time a freshman at Brown University, spotted some while poring over the Apollo 17 samples.

"A kid a year out of high school found these for us," Hauri told SPACE.com "That was pretty amazing in and of itself."

I decided to go to the Brown University web site to see if I could find out more about
Weinreich himself and the discovery. I was delighted to find an excellent story that also includes a great little
3 minute video clip where Weinreich and his supervisor, Alberto Saal, who is professor
of geological sciences, speak about the discovery and its background.

Originally Posted by Richard Lewis, Brown University web site

How about this for a summer job? “Brown professor seeks enterprising undergraduate to look at soil samples from the moon. Must be a self-starter, independent thinker, with acute attention to detail and an eye for discovery.”

It wasn’t a real job posting, but it describes Thomas Weinreich’s unique assignment in the summer after his freshman year at Brown.

I wholeheartedly recommend interested readers to follow the link below and be sure
to also watch the video that appears there which gives further insight into
behind the scenes of the discovery and the people involved.

http://news.brown.edu/features/2011/05/weinreich

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

It is fascinating that in a matter of week Internships have made historic discoveries, First "Missing Matter" and now "Water on the Moon".

[renormalised (Carl)]

Have to keep an eye on this one. Interesting find.

[CraigS]

So much of our knowledge about geology comes from the study of Earth-bound processes, which we have observed, first-hand, for centuries. By comparison, how much first-hand knowledge do we have of exo-geological processes ?

We venture onto another world, and find the same geological structures.

Does this mean, absolutely, that the same geological processes necessarily resulted in the same observations, on an alien world ?

How much exo-geology do we infer from familiar Earthly processes, when coming up with explanations for observations on different worlds ? Are we even fully conscious of these when developing exo-environmental theories?

How many permutations of the variables involved, might result in the same observations, but by different means ? Given the exact same initial environmental conditions that has resulted in water inclusions in a volcanic Earth rock, can we confidently predict that these will also result in the same water inclusions inside a moon rock ?

Come to think of it, putting aside the question of how did these water inclusions get into the moon-rock crystals …. do we really know where the Earth's water came from, why there is so much of it, and why it has stayed here ?



Cheers