EU Theory predictions for LCROSS moon impact mission?

[flyingcloud]

all ready for all this moon water:

Water Present Across The Moon's Surface, New Research Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 093559.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2009) — In a discovery that promises to reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially upend thinking of how it originated, scientists at several research institutions have found evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon
The molecules and hydroxyl — a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — were discovered across the entire surface of earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. While the abundances are not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil: harvesting one ton of the top layer of the moon’s surface would yield as much as 32 ounces of water, according to scientists involved in the discovery.

Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University, is the lead author of one paper this week in Science that reports evidence of water in the moon’s high latitudes — greatly expanding current thinking about where water in any form was presumed to be located.

“We’ve made a very important step with this discovery, and now there are some very important steps to follow up on,” Pieters said.

Professor of Geological Sciences Pieters is the lead investigator on the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument that was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. She said the findings from M3 reveal interesting, new questions about where the water molecules come from and where they may be going. Scientists have speculated that water molecules may migrate from non-polar regions of the moon to the poles, where they are stored as ice in ultra-frigid pockets of craters that never receive sunlight.

“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,” Pieters said.

She continued, “This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to ultilize it.”

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the moon’s surface, but the water signature appeared stronger at the moon’s higher latitudes. The M3 discovery was confirmed by data from two NASA spacecrafts — the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on the Cassini spacecraft and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft. Data from those missions also are being published in separate papers in Science.

Pieters credited the Indian space agency for its role in the findings. “If it weren’t for them, we wouldn't have been able to make this discovery,” she said.

Other Brown members listed as contributing authors to the M3 paper include Brown planetary geology faculty James Head III and John “Jack” Mustard; postdoctoral research associates Rachel Klima and Jeffrey Nettles; and graduate student Peter Isaacson.

Isaacson said the M3 results were a huge surprise. “There was no evidence that this was possible on such a broad scale,” he said. “This discovery turns a lot of the conventional thinking about the lunar surface on its head.”

Mustard, who has had major findings of water-bearing minerals on Mars, said the moon discovery is “intriguing, because it shows water on a planet that we weren’t anticipating, and it’s in a form that’s mysterious. The finding may have implications for other planets, such as Mars, but it is different.”

From its perch in lunar orbit, M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team analyzed data from the instrument, they found the wavelengths of light being absorbed were consistent with the absorption patterns for water molecules and hydroxyl.

“For silicate bodies, such features are typically attributed to water and hydroxyl-bearing materials,” Pieters said. “When we say ‘water on the moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface.”

[flyingcloud]

It's Official: Water Found on the Moon
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... overy.html

[junglelord]

WATER ON THE MOON: How much water can you squeeze out of a ton of moondust? About 32 ounces, according to NASA. In a press conference yesterday, the space agency announced that three spacecraft have found signs of water molecules mixed in lunar topsoil.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... nwater.htm

[solrey]

solrey on Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:29 pm
Oops, that should be direct evidence for H2O will be <0.1%

I'm glad I caught that and corrected it when I did because...

From NASA on Sep 24:
To put that into perspective, if you harvested one ton of the top layer of the Moon's surface, you could get as much as 32 ounces of water."

So, at most, there are 2 lbs of H2O for every 2,000 lbs of lunar soil...
which is 0.1% H2O


I know it's not from LCROSS, but can we call this an accurate prediction?

[allynh]

Then you have this from Wired Science.

Craters Show 1970s Viking Lander Missed Martian Ice by Inches
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/martian-ice/

[GaryN]

I'm puzzled by how water molecules exist at all on a body with no atmosphere, my science education must have been wrong, or there IS an atmosphere, or some other effect is allowing it to exist, perhaps for a short time?

[MattEU]

The Electric Universe Theory

A scientific theory must be:
1. a simple unifying idea that postulates nothing unnecessary

2. logically consistent (internally and externally)

3. Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena)

4. logically "OR" Empirically tested and based upon Controlled, Repeated Experiments . A theory which cannot be tested empirically is useless for researchers.

5. lead to predictions or retrodictions that are testable. A theory which has not made any actually verified predictions might prove useful in the future when its predictions are verified, but not currently. A theory which cannot provide retrodictions (to utilize present information or ideas to infer or explain a past event or state of affairs) may also be useful in the future, but not currently. If a theory's results cannot be reproduced, it is impossible to determine if those results were ever actually valid (rather than the result of error or fraud).

Strange how Dark Energy and Matter, Black Holes etc don't make this part of the list

Awesome prediction solrey, another one to add to the EU list of successful predictions. I would say do you work for NASA but then thinking about it you wouldnt last long if you did. You cant get stuff right first time otherwise everyone will be out of a career and a job!

Congrats must also be said to those who put all the effort in starting this website and those who have supported it. Only had one chance to thank Wal, David and the rest in person. Viva la Revolucion!

[solrey]

Congrats must also be said to those who put all the effort in starting this website and those who have supported it. Only had one chance to thank Wal, David and the rest in person. Viva la Revolucion!

Absolutely!

I wanted to elaborate on the chemical reaction chains I've been talking about on the electric comet topic on jref. It makes this little prediction even more specific.

solrey
23rd August 2009, 02:15 PM
BTW, there are a number of alkaline, or base, minerals that will produce H2O when reacting with an acid, the H+, in the solar plasma stream. The next reaction that would occur is when that water then reacts with free electrons, liberated from the surface, within the electric field of the discharge current. Mineral salts in the dust and flakes etched from the surface are probably involved in this reaction. The cathode reaction is:
2H2O + 2e- -> 2OH- + H2

solrey
23rd August 2009, 02:15 PM
Mercury like a comet? This is not just my opinion.

Mercury has a comet-like gas tail.

What about the atmosphere?

MESSENGER Scientists "Astonished" to Find Water in Mercury's Thin Atmosphere

Well, not really water. Water related ions, like OH-.

The surprising result is the detection of water-related ions like O+, OH-, and H2O+. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / U. Michigan
Quote:
How could there be water on Mercury? Zurburchen listed three possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive. Firstly, it has long been theorized (but not yet proved) from Earth-based radar observations that there may be reservoirs of water ice in small areas of Mercury's poles where local topography creates permanently shadowed spots in crater walls that might trap water over the age of the solar system. Second, the water could come from comets. Third, the process of chemical sputtering could create water where none existed before from the ingredients of solar wind and Mercury rock, as Zurburchen explains.

"The solar wind is highly ionized. Those are radicals -- they want to make connections with everything that they can. Imagine a solar wind hydrogen showing up and hitting the surface. It weathers whatever the mineral is, and steals an oxygen. If you do that, you get something like OH-, for example." OH-, also known as a hydroxyl group, would produce a peak at atomic mass 17 on the FIPS spectrum. "You can do it in reverse -- an oxygen from the solar wind can steal a hydrogen. The process is called chemical sputtering."

I think I've mentioned chemical sputtering as a way to produce OH-. Sodium is abundant, and the water related ions were surprisingly abundant, given the data on "magnetic tornado's", a.k.a. "flux transfer events", or a "discharge vortex" implies a Townsend dark discharge which could be another process for producing OH- as I've previously described. Was this overlooked, or was this discounted, or even feasible?

In an acid-base neutralization reaction,
– H+ from acid reacts with the OH– from base → water, H2O
– The cation (M+) from base combines with anion from acid (X–) → the salt

HX(aq) + BOH(aq) → H2O(l) + BX(aq)
acid base water salt
Note: -An acid will always react with a base to produce water and a salt.
– It does not matter if the salt produced is soluble or insoluble since water always forming means a reaction always occurs.

The next reaction that would occur is when that water then reacts with free electrons, liberated from the surface, within the electric field of the discharge current. Mineral salts in the dust and flakes etched from the surface are probably involved in this reaction. The cathode reaction is:
2H2O + 2e- -> 2OH- + H2

The reaction chain would result in a certain ratio of leftover sodium, likely a factor of the strength of the discharge.

In September 1985, the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) Spacecraft passed through the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini–Zinner at a distance of 7800 km downstream from the nucleus. The relative velocity between comet and spacecraft was 21 km/s, and instruments aboard the spacecraft made magnetic field, energetic particle, and ion composition measurements. The composition measurements showed the presence of water group and CO+ions, as well as an appreciable, but localized flux of ions havingM/Q= 24 ± 1 adjacent to the edges of the plasma tail. These ions were tentatively identified by M. A. Coplanet al.(1987,J. Geophys. Res.92, 39–46) as either C+2or Na+. Motivated by recent observations of neutral sodium in the tail of Comet Hale–Bopp (G. Cremoneseet al., 1997,Astrophys. J. Lett.490, L199), the Giacobini–Zinner composition data have been reexamined, particularly with regard to the spatial distribution of theM/Q= 24 ± 1 ions, now identified as Na+. This conclusion along with other observations of neutral sodium in comets clearly show that there are a variety of sources of sodium in comets.

The point I was making is that the same processes are observed on multiple objects in the solar system. The sodium is important in identifying a more complex reaction than just H+ attaching to oxygen atoms, which is NASA's guess as to how the water is created. The clue is the fact that the moon has a thin atmosphere of sodium and potassium.

The ratio of the density of sodium to the density of potassium is (6 ± 3) to 1, which is close to the sodium to potassium ratio in the lunar surface, suggesting that the atmosphere originates from the vaporization of surface minerals.

Vaporization? Or by-products, of those acid-base to water-salt, chemical reactions I described?

[MattEU]

This is helping me by starting to explain why water (liquids) are so important, found everywhere and why the earth has so much water and salty water.

The fact that water vapour has been detected in sunspots and also coming from water masers seems to be evidence that water is created by plasma discharges or z-pinches (not sure of correct terminology for these things) that are happening there, or, does this idea have to change now and it is actually formed from a reaction with the plasma / birkeland currents coming from them?

Water vapour is also found coming from comets and this keeps up the idea of the "dirty snowball comet". But the water vapour is actually an electrochemical reaction on the surface, similar to the Moons water and liquid masers?

Would the formation of liquids and minerals involve dust because dust is so important in this universe? It is found everywhere and appears to also be created by plasma discharges? Dust and minerals are also found to be coming from masers.

I had been looking into Hydroxyl (OH), as that is what they detected on the Moon, and noticed that it forms a lot of basic stuff including cellulose (cell walls and algae). Hydroxyl combined with carbon makes Methanol and Ethanol. Speaking to a friend about this he mentioned that there were massive clouds of alcohol found in space. Something I had somehow never heard of! They seem to be linked to masers and massive dust clouds. You have different types of masers which appear to be particles affected by a magnetic field and in space you cant have a magnetic field without the flow of electrical current.


Liquid masers - Water ,OH and Alcohol masers

OH masers also have been discovered flaring up with large magnetic fields and you cant have magnetic fields in space...

An OH maser flare with a strong magnetic field in W75N

The flare consisted of several maser spots. Four of the spots were found to form Zeeman
pairs, all of them with a magnetic field strength of about 40 mG. This is the highest ever
magnetic field strength found in OH masers, an order of magnitude higher than in typical OH
masers....

H2O-masers have also been found near the OH masers inW75N, located in two clusters
around VLA1 and VLA2. Torrelles et al. (2003) have found a shell of water masers around
the ultra-compact HII region VLA2 with a radius of 160 AU. The shell is expanding with a
velocity of 28 km s−1 , perhaps episodically as in a recurrent outflow. The high magnetic
field OH maser spots Z4-Z7 are located very close to VLA2, at a distance of 55 mas
(±40 mas), or at the projected distance of 110 AU (±80 AU). Therefore, the OH masers
may well be located in the same shell as the water masers. The magnetic field in water
masers associated with star-forming regions is typically around 100 mG, which is about
the same order of magnitude as in the OH maser flare reported here....

Conclusions
A very strong magnetic field of 40 mG has been detected in several OH masers spots
which have appeared during a flare of OH maser emission in 2000, within 110 AU from
the ultra-compact HII region. The magnetic field probably originates in the exciting star
where its intensity is about 500 G, or from the compression of interstellar gas by MHD
shock, or in icy planetary bodies serving as nuclei for the maser spot emission.

maser spots, Zeeman pairs, shells of masers, magnetic fields

2 more interesting things it states are about the spectral emissions and perhaps proof that it is an Electric Universe and everything is on local circuits.

In the same time interval the rest of the spectral features remained unchanged. All constant
features are connected with the ultra-compact HII region VLA1 while the variable
features are connected with VLA2.

The appearance of new strong maser features and the simultaneous dimming of nearby
features can be interpreted as originating from the passage of a magnetohydrodynamic
(MHD) shock (Alakoz et al. 2005). The shock was probably generated by the exciting
star of VLA2 and propagated in the gas of the stellar wind.

Is this proof of the local EU circuit for this area?

An OH maser flare with a strong magnetic field in W75N. The abstract mentions a few more things that may be of interest.

Types of Astrophysical maser that have been found, copied from wiki:

* OH
* CH
* H2CO
* H2O
* NH3, 15NH3
* CH3OH
* SiS
* HC3N
* SiO, 29SiO, 30SiO
* HCN, H13CN
* H

[MattEU]

SCIENTISTS TAP INTO CLOUDS OF PURE ALCOHOL IN OUTER SPACE

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Using data collected by researchers at Ohio State University, astronomers have found vast quantities of pure alcohol in an interstellar cloud some 10,000 light years from Earth. Scientists said the cloud, located near the constellation Aquila, contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

The discovery was made during a study of how stars begin. Stars form from interstellar clouds, large conglomerations of gases and dust particles which can extend hundreds of light years across. Scientists have known for some time that the largest component of these clouds is hydrogen, but until now, they were not sure if ethyl alcohol molecules were also an ingredient...


ethyl alcohol.

Ethyl alcohol can only be observed in its gaseous phase. To observe the frequencies of ethanol, De Lucia and Herbst used a laboratory microwave spectrometer developed by De Lucia, a tabletop apparatus that shoots waves of radiation through a gaseous molecular sample. The molecule absorbs the radiation at selected radio frequencies, which are identical with the frequencies emitted by the molecules in space. A detector on the spectrometer records the frequencies for study....

..."It seems the ethanol molecule is found in relatively high concentrations in regions where stars are forming," Herbst said. "The current thought is that ethanol is formed on the surface of tiny sand-like particles in interstellar clouds. The heat from the star that is forming transforms the molecule to a gas and we are able to observe it."

...The research suggests that ethanol can be found in other interstellar clouds in which stars are forming, Herbst said.

SCIENTISTS TAP INTO CLOUDS OF PURE ALCOHOL IN OUTER SPACE

[MGmirkin]

My take on the issue:

(Electrical Erosion [Sputtering] in Our Electric Solar System)
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/elect ... lar-system

Best,
~Michael Gmirkin

[MattEU]

This is being discussed in the "Electric Universe" lobby post titled EU Theory predictions for LCROSS moon impact mission?. solrey not only predicted how much water would be found but gave the mechanism for how it was created. Then NASA read it and copied him

If Theories are about accurate predictions then solrey and the Electric Universe have done it again!

[MGmirkin]

WATER ON THE MOON: How much water can you squeeze out of a ton of moondust? About 32 ounces, according to NASA. In a press conference yesterday, the space agency announced that three spacecraft have found signs of water molecules mixed in lunar topsoil.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... nwater.htm

Ooh, now that page *is* interesting, if only for the link at he bottom to detailed multimedia images... Thanks JL. Glad you pointed out this particular version of the article. It actually leads me to an interesting line of thought...

In particular, these images:

(Daytime Water Cycle on the Moon)
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/fea ... hine4.html

(Water Abundance Dependent on Temperature)
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/fea ... hine2.html

They seem to take the "it depends on temperature" approach. BUT... (You knew it was coming!) ...there's another possible way to approach the problem. Electric fields!

One should keep in mind that it's been speculated that the day side and night side of the moon may be charged to different potentials...

Remember this semi-recent article?

(The Moon and the Magnetotail)
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/fea ... 80416.html

In particular:

During the crossing, the moon comes in contact with a gigantic “plasma sheet” of hot charged particles trapped in the tail. The lightest and most mobile of these particles, electrons, pepper the moon’s surface and give the moon a negative charge.

On the moon’s dayside this effect is counteracted to a degree by sunlight: UV photons knock electrons back off the surface, keeping the build-up of charge at relatively low levels. But on the nightside, in the cold lunar dark, electrons accumulate and surface voltages can climb to hundreds or thousands of volts.

The ground, meanwhile, might leap into the sky. There’s growing evidence that fine particles of moondust might actually float, ejected from the lunar surface by electrostatic repulsion

Stranger still, moondust might gather itself into a sort of diaphanous wind. Drawn by differences in global charge accumulation, floating dust would naturally fly from the strongly-negative nightside to the weakly-negative dayside. This “dust storm” effect would be strongest at the moon’s terminator, the dividing line between day and night.

They seem to be more-or-less saying that an electric potential would be set up along the terminator between the day side and night side due to differences in relative charge.

It's interesting to note that the water abundance image shows water abundance to be highest along the day-night terminator. Is there a remote possibility that the electric fields thereabouts might in some way play a role in water production? Granted, it seems like the electric fields would be horizontal rather than vertical. Don't know whether that's important to the issue or not? I just thought it was interesting that the water / hydroyxl signal seems strongest in the region they've said an electric potential might exist... Related or not, it's at least an interesting coincidence. A point to ponder.

Now that I think about it, there are two prior articles that seems related...

(Moon Fountains)
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005 ... ntains.htm

On the Moon, there is no rubbing. The dust is electrostatically charged by the Sun in two different ways: by sunlight itself and by charged particles flowing out from the Sun (the solar wind).

On the daylit side of the Moon, solar ultraviolet and X-ray radiation is so energetic that it knocks electrons out of atoms and molecules in the lunar soil. Positive charges build up until the tiniest particles of lunar dust (measuring 1 micron and smaller) are repelled from the surface and lofted anywhere from meters to kilometers high, with the smallest particles reaching the highest altitudes, Stubbs explains. Eventually they fall back toward the surface where the process is repeated over and over again.

[image]

If that's what happens on the day side of the Moon, the natural question then becomes, what happens on the night side? The dust there, Stubbs believes, is negatively charged. This charge comes from electrons in the solar wind, which flows around the Moon onto the night side. Indeed, the fountain model suggests that the night side would charge up to higher voltages than the day side, possibly launching dust particles to higher velocities and altitudes.

Day side: positive. Night side: negative. What, then, happens at the Moon's terminator--the moving line of sunrise or sunset between day and night?

There could be "significant horizontal electric fields forming between the day and night areas, so there might be horizontal dust transport," Stubbs speculates. "Dust would get sucked across the terminator sideways." Because the biggest flows would involve microscopic particles too small to see with the naked eye, an astronaut would not notice dust speeding past. Still, if he or she were on the Moon's dark side alert for lunar sunrise, the astronaut "might see a weird, shifting glow extending along the horizon, almost like a dancing curtain of light." Such a display might resemble pale auroras on Earth.

(Moon Storms)
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005 ... storms.htm

What could cause this? Stubbs has an idea: "The dayside of the moon is positively charged; the nightside is negatively charged." At the interface between night and day, he explains, "electrostatically charged dust would be pushed across the terminator sideways," by horizontal electric fields ...

Even more surprising, Olhoeft continues, a few hours after every lunar sunrise, the experiment's temperature rocketed so high--near that of boiling water--that "LEAM had to be turned off because it was overheating."

Best,
~Michael Gmirkin

[jjohnson]

An element I haven't seen discussed about the LCROSS impactor is that it uses the General Dynamics Centaur upper stage as the vehicle which de-orbits the assembly for the impact. Centaur is powered by LOX and liquid hydrogen. One trusts that they have planned to perform an ullage burn after the de-orbit burn to get the liquids to the aft end of the tank and then vent all remaining propellant to space prior to the impact. OF course, the fuel vector and the rocket vector will have some similarity. It sure would ruin an otherwise interesting experiment about water if a couple hundred kilos of hydrogen and oxygen arrive about the same time as the impactor.

Picky picky picky...

[StevenO]

Did'nt I show you guys that the base E/M field (the photon field that causes the + and - electric forces) is about 110x stronger at the moon's surface than at the earth's surface?

At the moon's surface the base E/M repelling force is about 40% of the strength of the moon's gravity. That makes electric effects at the moons surface about 400x prominent than at the earth's surface. I'm sure that must be noticed.

An article about the numbers can be found here: The Moon Gives up a Secret or a little more general here: The E/M Fields of Solar System Bodies.