Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on The Moon in 1976

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27883/

by Anon84 • 14 years ago

129 42 14 years ago

technologyreview.com

ig1• 14 years ago

Surely the cross-contamination arguments apply to the Soviet sample as well ?

toemetoch• 14 years ago

My thought exactly. Couldn't they settle this with an isotope analysis?

glesica• 14 years ago

Not if their container sealed properly.

ktizo3• 14 years ago

In the article it states that the cross contamination arguments applied to the nasa rocks because the astronauts couldn't get the lid back on the sample containers. There could be contamination of the Russian samples, but the same argument about containers being improperly sealed doesn't apply unless there is some sort of evidence that it should.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

How many container designs were tested? Between 11 and 17 there were 6 landings. Did they notice the problem on 11?

It's an interesting problem. The sample container will have to hold the external pressure out and, depending on the container temperature, deal with condensation around the seal.

Jun8• 14 years ago

Another example of just what a huge goldmine Russian technical journals can be for researchers, if you can read them.

Create3• 14 years ago

They were being read, even at the time. Although an NLP disaster at the time, it was a boon for programming languages. Old story in new package:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120529-a-cold-war-google-t...

(Chomsky and all the compiler people got their funding from there)

raverbashing• 14 years ago

the F-117 was built based on a Russian paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backgr...

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

Makes you wonder why the Russians are only just investing in stealth technology. The US has been doing it for more than three decades.

themstheones• 14 years ago

The soviet space program sure is standing the test of time.

unreal37• 14 years ago

How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure Russian science journal and the argument would have been put to permanent rest". 1976 was a different time in Russian-American relations especially when it came to space.

The article ends by saying our belief of water on the moon has improved from "one part per billion" in 2006, to "one part per million" today, like it's a huge revolutionary improvement. I know it's 1000x, but its still just one part per million. So it takes a million gallons of moon rocks to extract one gallon of water?

Which makes me wonder what the water ppm of Earth is.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

For the surface, at least, it's about 750K ppm, but most of it is around 1M ppm.

pyre2• 14 years ago

750,000 parts per million = 75% 1,000,000 parts per million = 100%

Did you mean to say 1 part/750K and 1 part/1M ?

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

23000 per million, 23 per thousand or one per 4400 (assuming parts are measured by mass)[1]

1. http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/aug97/868365319.Es.r.ht...

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Psst...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Proje...

Note the date.

Create3• 14 years ago

I think that mission "only" came to be, because both sides had to have a backup/rescue kit. The hot-spare became useless when both capsule-based (Soyuz/Skylab-Apollo) programmes came to an end with their last flight. By combining, they both got another "free" flight: it was too good to pass up the billion dollars found free with the deal.

batista• 14 years ago

>How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure Russian science journal and the argument would have been put to permanent rest". 1976 was a different time in Russian-American relations especially when it came to space.

That makes no sense. Actually BECAUSE of the cold war Americans should have studies Russian scientific results more at the time, even to the point of spying on them, not just reading published journals --after all you don't want the "enemy" to have an advantage over you.

wdewind• 14 years ago

Which just brings it full circle one more time: the Russians would know this and thus be incentivized to plant misleading stories.

planetguy• 14 years ago

If we believe the Russian data then they found one part per thousand. By mass. So a gallon of water would only require you to process three hundred gallons of rock. And the "processing" isn't that difficult: heat it up and collect the vapor.

Besides, even if it is parts per million, that ain't bad. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining gold can be economically mined at a couple of ppm, while copper and nickel are mined at parts per thousand.

sambeau• 14 years ago

1:4400 (0.02%)

http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what-percent-of-earth-is-...

Of course, a sample taken from the Earth's surface would provide a widely different result (ranging ~0% to ~100%) depending on where it was taken.

noselasd• 14 years ago

As we're on the topic of the Soviet space program, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1 is worth a read - they were driving rovers around on the moon in 1970

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

Is that still on the moon?

mongolinux• 14 years ago

Of course it is still on the moon )) It was lost and forgotten in 71, but rediscovered recently: http://www.space.com/8295-lost-soviet-reflecting-device-redi...

ck2• 14 years ago

I wonder what kind of war moon-water will start.

The first country to start using it is going to cause an uproar.

run4yourlives• 14 years ago

You're going to start moon wars when Canada has 10% of all the freshwater on the planet?

SudarshanP• 14 years ago

What he probably means is that, the small quantities of ice on moon is precious. If some country say US manages to extract it all for itself, other countries like China could be pissed off... But I kinda like such a race ;-) minus the war though...

scarmig• 14 years ago

"Water on the moon" and "water on the earth" have very different values: the cost of transport dwarfs the cost of the water. A barrel of water on the moon is worth millions because of those costs. Beyond that, "water on the moon" is relatively cheaply converted into "water in space."

I still doubt that a war would end up happening over it, if only because it appears relatively cheap enough to extract that it's not worth the effort and risk to build a war-making apparatus to prevent other people from extracting it.

mukaiji• 14 years ago

Yet another sad example of how ideology got the best of science.

Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on The Moon in 1976

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