Hi Pascal, Fascinating is what comes to mind. You are very interesting to listen to. I miss our talks from HMP, I am still hoping in my lifetime, humans will set foot on Mars. Did you ever finish the sci-fi book you were writing about HMP? I miss the space program, I have been working as a service engineer on the A380 the since Space Shuttle decommissions, The cancelation of the Constellation program has set human exploration back but hoping someday a funded program with goals will reinvigorate exploration again for my grandchildren. Not sure anymore if it will happen in my lifetime. Keep making these documentaries, you are so interesting.
I believe its most important to find caves, where the temperature is around 20 degree celsius most of the time. Regarding Water, a closed cycle does not need to much water to sustain life. To generate fuel through electrolyses, this can be done in a robotic process. Therefor it is most feasible to organise the robotic water excavation from the human outpost further away instead from earth.
There is nothing that indicates that it could not have been meteorites that hit and caused the lava tubes to collapse and form those really round holes. The ceiling of the lava tubes may have been thin enough not to offer enough resistance to create a typical crater angular wall. Along with ice languishing within these caves, there may be some really deep lava tubes that contain gases like oxygen and nitrogen. If the caves are deep enough, there could actually be some air pressure from the weight of the air albeit not as much pressure as on earth.
The premise that lava tubes at the poles should be a particularly good spot to search for water is unconvincing. The reason is that permanent shadow anywhere on the moon should suffice to protect impact ice. There is no reason to suspect that lava tubes on the poles are any more likely to receive cometary water than lava tubes at the equator. Comet impacts can occur anywhere.
Hi. Not a premise intended to convince yet, merely a hypothesis to test. It is true that PSRs (Permanently Shadowed Regions) at the lunar poles are cold and vast enough to trap substantial ice. BUT a) any ice at the very surface will be subject to meteoritic erosion and micrometeoritic gardening, so not much ice can accumulate at the very surface at the poles; b) any buried ice at the poles will likely be challenging to access and extract, mainly because mixed in with regolith rather than occurring as massive buried ice (at least that's what current limited data suggests). The new finding merely opens a potential alternative. The interiors of lava tubes at Philolaus Crater, should their existence be confirmed, would be significantly colder than lava tubes at low latitudes, both because max, min, and average surface and ground temperatures are substantially colder at Philoaus than at low latitudes, AND no sunlight enters the skylight and tube directly at Philolaus' latitude, so rocks in the cave never get warm and start radiating heat. Such cold near-polar lava tubes could cold-trap water ice too. Meanwhile, ice at the poles is not just from direct cometary delivery at the poles, but from both cometary and asteroidal water delivery at all latitudes on the Moon, followed by net migration of this water poleward over time. The solar wind may also contribute to forming water which migrates poleward as well. Water then accumulates wherever it encounters (very) cold traps along the way: at the poles mostly for sure, but possibly also in very cold near-polar caves. In the latter case, water could accumulate without significant regolith mixing or subsequent meteoritic erosion, and so might build up as massive ice (as in "clean ice", not necessarily in "massive" amounts). Agreed, there are still several ifs, buts, and maybes in all this, but the potential is such that I thought the preliminary finding warranted being reported and allowed to be further investigated in detail.
@@pascallee291 When an asteroid or comet strikes the moon, (depending on the speed,) the water contained would most likely vaporize or liquify. If the comet breaks through the regolith and penetrates into a lava tube, that vapor and or liquid might be at least partially contained within that extremely cold environment, indefinitely. We don't know what happens when asteroids might have a speed that, relative to the moon's speed, is not really that fast. Anything that approaches the earth in that fashion gets sucked down the earth's "gravity well" and speeds up tremendously, but the moon is much smaller so the speeds might not be that great. Also, gases like oxygen and hydrogen atoms might somehow find there way into and down the collapsed lava tubes and down to the deepest parts of the tubes where they would combine into H2O. Things like Helium3 might also be found as a gas in those tubes. This may sound far-fetched but with billions and billions of years of time for these things to happen I think it is quite possible. Those collapsed lava tubes might have been acting like drains for gases and vapors moving around the surface of the moon for a very long time.
The Earth and Moon are currently thought to have formed as a result of Theia, a rogue body about the size of Mars, colliding with ProtoEarth, a somewhat smaller version of our planet that indeed existed before the impact that formed modern Earth. But ProtoEarth did not form much earlier, just a little earlier. ProtoEarth is estimated to have formed 4.54 billion years ago. The Theia impact and the formation of the Earth and the Moon are estimated to have taken place between 4.51 and 4.47 billion years ago, so "merely" 30 to 70 million years after the formation of ProtoEarth.
Dr Lee, I never saw this before I gave my LLT Presentations at TMS Conferences in 2019 and 2020.
Hi Pascal, Fascinating is what comes to mind. You are very interesting to listen to. I miss our talks from HMP, I am still hoping in my lifetime, humans will set foot on Mars. Did you ever finish the sci-fi book you were writing about HMP? I miss the space program, I have been working as a service engineer on the A380 the since Space Shuttle decommissions, The cancelation of the Constellation program has set human exploration back but hoping someday a funded program with goals will reinvigorate exploration again for my grandchildren. Not sure anymore if it will happen in my lifetime. Keep making these documentaries, you are so interesting.
I believe its most important to find caves, where the temperature is around 20 degree celsius most of the time. Regarding Water, a closed cycle does not need to much water to sustain life. To generate fuel through electrolyses, this can be done in a robotic process. Therefor it is most feasible to organise the robotic water excavation from the human outpost further away instead from earth.
There is nothing that indicates that it could not have been meteorites that hit and caused the lava tubes to collapse and form those really round holes. The ceiling of the lava tubes may have been thin enough not to offer enough resistance to create a typical crater angular wall. Along with ice languishing within these caves, there may be some really deep lava tubes that contain gases like oxygen and nitrogen. If the caves are deep enough, there could actually be some air pressure from the weight of the air albeit not as much pressure as on earth.
The premise that lava tubes at the poles should be a particularly good spot to search for water is unconvincing. The reason is that permanent shadow anywhere on the moon should suffice to protect impact ice. There is no reason to suspect that lava tubes on the poles are any more likely to receive cometary water than lava tubes at the equator. Comet impacts can occur anywhere.
Hi. Not a premise intended to convince yet, merely a hypothesis to test. It is true that PSRs (Permanently Shadowed Regions) at the lunar poles are cold and vast enough to trap substantial ice. BUT a) any ice at the very surface will be subject to meteoritic erosion and micrometeoritic gardening, so not much ice can accumulate at the very surface at the poles; b) any buried ice at the poles will likely be challenging to access and extract, mainly because mixed in with regolith rather than occurring as massive buried ice (at least that's what current limited data suggests). The new finding merely opens a potential alternative. The interiors of lava tubes at Philolaus Crater, should their existence be confirmed, would be significantly colder than lava tubes at low latitudes, both because max, min, and average surface and ground temperatures are substantially colder at Philoaus than at low latitudes, AND no sunlight enters the skylight and tube directly at Philolaus' latitude, so rocks in the cave never get warm and start radiating heat. Such cold near-polar lava tubes could cold-trap water ice too. Meanwhile, ice at the poles is not just from direct cometary delivery at the poles, but from both cometary and asteroidal water delivery at all latitudes on the Moon, followed by net migration of this water poleward over time. The solar wind may also contribute to forming water which migrates poleward as well. Water then accumulates wherever it encounters (very) cold traps along the way: at the poles mostly for sure, but possibly also in very cold near-polar caves. In the latter case, water could accumulate without significant regolith mixing or subsequent meteoritic erosion, and so might build up as massive ice (as in "clean ice", not necessarily in "massive" amounts). Agreed, there are still several ifs, buts, and maybes in all this, but the potential is such that I thought the preliminary finding warranted being reported and allowed to be further investigated in detail.
@@pascallee291 When an asteroid or comet strikes the moon, (depending on the speed,) the water contained would most likely vaporize or liquify. If the comet breaks through the regolith and penetrates into a lava tube, that vapor and or liquid might be at least partially contained within that extremely cold environment, indefinitely. We don't know what happens when asteroids might have a speed that, relative to the moon's speed, is not really that fast. Anything that approaches the earth in that fashion gets sucked down the earth's "gravity well" and speeds up tremendously, but the moon is much smaller so the speeds might not be that great. Also, gases like oxygen and hydrogen atoms might somehow find there way into and down the collapsed lava tubes and down to the deepest parts of the tubes where they would combine into H2O. Things like Helium3 might also be found as a gas in those tubes. This may sound far-fetched but with billions and billions of years of time for these things to happen I think it is quite possible. Those collapsed lava tubes might have been acting like drains for gases and vapors moving around the surface of the moon for a very long time.
I feel like the earth is older than we think. This large planetary impact is what we believe is the beginning. Yet it was around before that
The Earth and Moon are currently thought to have formed as a result of Theia, a rogue body about the size of Mars, colliding with ProtoEarth, a somewhat smaller version of our planet that indeed existed before the impact that formed modern Earth. But ProtoEarth did not form much earlier, just a little earlier. ProtoEarth is estimated to have formed 4.54 billion years ago. The Theia impact and the formation of the Earth and the Moon are estimated to have taken place between 4.51 and 4.47 billion years ago, so "merely" 30 to 70 million years after the formation of ProtoEarth.
@@pascallee291ya horse shit u can't prove
You and Elon Musk are the same person! You speak just like him!