WE CAN BUILD SUNWAY THEME PARK ON MOON

Saw this Google's interesting image today?

On 13 November 2009, NASA has confirmed the presence of water on the surface of moon after decades of dispute over the validity on the data collected over the years regarding the presence of H2O on our own natural satellite.

The undergoing program by NASA, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) - a robotic spacecraft mission which its objective to confirmed presence of water has seem to have achieved it. According to Wikipedia, LCROSS and LRO form the vanguard of NASA's return to the Moon, and are expected to influence United States government decisions on whether or not to colonize the Moon. Launched on June 18 this year, the spacecraft has effectively traced a certain amount of water from the surfaces of the moon.

This discovery may not be surprising at all when NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a parallel project to LCROSS has found more evidence of lunar polar water ice. However, there is no doubt that the amount of water may be influenced by many external circumstances.

According to Space.com, the amount of water may be less than any amount that can be collected on any desert on Earth, "One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water".

"If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the three studies in Science on the lunar find, in a statement. "This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it."

FOUND??

"Yes, we found water," said Anthony Colaprete, a principal project investigator at Nasa's Ames research centre in California. "We didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount." - Guardian UK

This will be forever be seen as a miss. Back in 1969, rocks sample brought back to Earth when Neil Amstrong landed on the moon, found no traces of water and now we have some. Well, that was a miss!!

For this particular discovery, "NASA has found the equivalent amount of 24 gallons (about 96 litres) of frozen water mixed in with the rock and dust that was thrown into the air when a rocket was deliberately crashed into a crater near the Moon's south pole last month." IThe discovery is made possible by deliberately crash-landing of the LCROSS into the permanently shadowed crater Cabeus on the moon's south pole. While the discovery has managed to put a dot on the questionable condition for moon to hold water, there are many things to prove.

HOW??

"The sensors on the craft has detected evidence of hydrogen on the lunar surface, but the quantities were tiny. A major breakthrough came last September, when India announced that its Chandrayaan-1 craft had detected that chemical reactions producing water are still taking place." - Telegraph

"Additional evidence of water on the moon came from LCROSS's ultraviolet spectrometer, which detected energy signatures associated with hydroxyl, a byproduct of the breakup of water by sunlight." - NAT GEO

WHERE IS WATER FROM??

The best answer to this is probably unknown.

Theory number one has that the hydrogen released from the sun's "active nuclear plant" that arrived on the moon surface by the solar winds (remember that moon has no profound atmosphere) could have reacted with traces of oxygen in the Moon rock to produce water.

Theory number two meanwhile has that the water may have a result of vapour produced when comets and meteors crashed into the Moon's surface.

SIGNIFICANT TO NASA??

"Nasa has been so keen to find water on the Moon because it brings the dream of a permanent lunar base one step closer. If water exists in the quantities that Nasa now believes, it could be drunk by astronauts, turned into oxygen to make stations inhabitable and – most excitingly – converted into fuel. The Moon could then become the space equivalent of a service station – acting as a staging post for manned missions to Mars." - Telegraph

SIGNIFICANT TO ME??

Expect Sunway Lagoon 2 to be opened at the Moon in 2099. Anyone up for splashing time on the moon?