Most Precious/ Most Common Matter

Most Precious/ Most Common Matter

The Water Cycle

Cooking Up Water From the Moon? NASA Studies Water Extraction With Microwaves

Dr. Ed Ethridge holds his “moon in a bottle” experiment in his lab at the Marshall Center. Ethridge and his team have successfully extracted water from simulated lunar soil using a standard one-kilowatt microwave oven. His research is opening new doors of opportunity to harvest water from the moon to sustain life and produce rocket propellant for future lunar missions. (NASA/MSFC)

Using multi-physics modeling tools, NASA scientists can predict the absorption of microwave energy into the simulated lunar soil as well as the temperature distribution. (NASA)

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2009/09-083.html

NASA's Goddard Wins Science Awards for Robotic Moon Mission

This is a map of potential hydrogen deposits on the north pole of the moon made using the Neutron Spectrometer instrument on the Lunar Prospector mission. Blue areas are where low numbers of neutrons were detected, marking regions with potential hydrogen or water ice deposits. Note the concentrations near the pole.

Credit: William Feldman/Los Alamos National Labs.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/lro_awards_release.html

Water Detected at High Latitudes on the Moon 

NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an instrument on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 mission, took this image of Earth's moon. It is a three-color composite of reflected near-infrared radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. 

Small amounts of water were detected on the surface of the moon at various locations. 

This image illustrates their distribution at high latitudes toward the poles. 

Blue shows the signature of water, green shows the brightness of the surface as measured by reflected infrared radiation from the sun and red shows an iron-bearing mineral called pyroxene.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1478.html

Water Mass Map from Neutron Spectrometer

This map shows the estimated lower limit of the water content of the upper meter of Martian soil. The estimates are derived from the hydrogen abundance measured by the neutron spectrometer component of the gamma ray spectrometer suite on NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. 
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/multimedia/6433-20080513.html

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Water-Rich Terrain

This three-dimensional image of a trough in the Nili Fossae region of Mars shows a type of minerals called phyllosilicates (in magenta and blue hues) concentrated on the slopes of mesas and along canyon walls. The abundance of phyllosilicates shows that water played a sizable role in changing the minerals of a variety of terrains in the planet's early history.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/University of Arizona/Brown University. 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/trough-20080716.html

Astronaut Leroy Chiao

Astronaut Leroy Chiao, Expedition 10 commander and NASA ISS science officer, watches a sphere of water float between him and the camera, showing his image refracted, on the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/Exp10_image_009.html

Water's Early Journey

 

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope observed a fledgling solar system, like the one depicted in this artist's concept, and discovered deep within it enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times. 

This water vapor starts out in the form of ice in a cloudy cocoon (not pictured) that surrounds the embryonic star, called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B (buried in center of image). 

Material from the cocoon, including ice, falls toward the center of the cloud. 

The ice then smacks down onto a dusty pre-planetary disk circling the stellar embryo (doughnut-shaped cloud) and vaporizes. 

Eventually, this water might make its way into developing planets.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

ISS Gets Commercial Water Utility Service 
AVIATION WEEK

A commercially provided water generation system is now aboard the International Space Station as part of the STS-131 payload, a key milestone in a unique contracting arrangement between NASA and Hamilton Sundstrand Space, Land & Sea.

The United Technologies Corp. subsidiary, best known as the manufacturer of NASA’s Extravehicular Mobility Activity suits, built the Sabatier Reactor System to provide the space station with an alternative chemical reaction water production facility. Under a 2008 fixed-price, sole-source contract with NASA, Hamilton Sundstrand can earn as much as $65 million through September 2014 by having the service available for astronauts’ use.

“We get paid by the availability to produce the product … much like you’d pay for cable TV or DirecTV for as long as the service is up and operational,” Dave Parker, Hamilton Sundstrand’s manager of space programs, said in an interview. “It’s a very unique contracting model with NASA.”

Read this aticle by Irene Klotz  ISS Gets Commercial Water Utility Service | AVIATION WEEK