Moon is dry

[zakur]

Radar data evaporate Moon's ice sheets

The thick ice sheets many astronomers thought were hidden in some of the Moon's craters almost certainly do not exist, according to observations from the world's biggest radar.

The 300-metre Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico was used to bounce radio waves into dark craters at the Moon's north and south poles. Sunlight never reaches the bottom of these craters, meaning ice could survive there.

[...]

But the new Arecibo investigation has come to a very different conclusion. Team leader Bruce Campbell, at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, told New Scientist: "There are no thick ice deposits in the areas we observed." The researchers surveyed 20 per cent of the Moon's shadowed regions.

One crater, called Shackleton, did return a strong echo, mimicking the Clementine data. But so did another crater that is not permanently shadowed, meaning it could not be caused by ice.

"We think that the rough, tilted walls of those craters were producing the strong reflections, not ice," Campbell explains.

The new data does not rule out ice altogether. The experiment would only detect ice sheets more than a metre thick. Any thinner deposits, or small ice crystals distributed in the lunar dust, would have remained undetected.

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

we could crash comets into the craters.

 

[Iamme]

zakur---And it is stories like you illustrated that cause scientists to use various testing methods. You can't beat just going there to find out!

We need to go to Mars, too, to see if aliens carved people faces there.

If you think about it; we put great faith in our scientists who tell us there are stars out there. Our proof lie in what instruments tell us. We have never actually sent a spacecraft to another star, other than our sun, to make sure there really are such things. The gods could be toying with us by creating a 'reality' that isn't there. Maybe the universe works like a movie set. The foreground has real scenery. The backround has fake scenery. Think Wizard of Oz movie. The gods could also project heat per star/galaxy image so this would fake out spectrometers, and other such instruments. One could argue by saying, "How can this be. We have seen the universe in motion. Stars are fleeing from us. The universe is not stationary." Well, o.k., the 'backdrop' then could be like a movie screen, which would be in 2-d...but showing things as 3-d, like our own movies decieve us into thinking.

 

[BTox]

You're right. I think the stars are just pinholes in a big piece of black plastic that surrounds the earth. Sun, schmun. Probably just a spotlight on a wire.