Now? After all these years???
 

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/nasa-moon-sunlight-water-sofia-artemis-162600047.html

I see a big new movie in the making. Calling Ridley Scott....

Cool, like ice man.

The abandoned lunar rovers will need some snow tires.
Calling VW....

On this evenings news tonite.
What has changed since the 70's?

This is a major discovery. They never looked for water on the sunlit surfaces, because everything we know of zero atmosphere hydrology says there will be no water there. The water molecules that might have existed there literally bounced across the surface of the Moon until they bounced into certain crater floors that have been shielded from the sun for billions of years, where they then froze together into tiny ice lakes.

The fact that there is water that didn't bounce away already means that it was produced in the last few tens of thousands of years, maybe less (I don't know the time frame for water bouncing).

This is why it's a travesty that we don't have a base up there, because our modern tools, technology and techniques would have told us this 20 years ago, if we had stayed the course.

"...What’s more, it was found in concentrations ranging from 100 to 412 parts per million — roughly 12 ounces of liquid in a square meter of lunar soil or about 100 times drier than the Sahara...."

It seems that the water must be trapped in a matrix that shields it somehow. Maybe similar to SiO2 · nH2O?

Weren't all the lunar excursions on the sun-lit side?
Or were they too close to the dark/unlit side?

There is no such thing as a dark side, or un-lit side of the moon. Should have been called "The un seen from Earth side".

How can the sun light-up both sides of the moon at once?
What am I missing here?

The Sun directly illuminates the far side of the Moon when it is between the Earth and the Sun. At other times the far side is indirectly illuminated giving it a twilight appearance. Both sides get direct sunlight...at different times.

More here
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/far-side.html

Yes. It sucked that the Funding was pulled for the remainder of the Apollo landings and the Space Shuttle in the 1970s. Instead, we got Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz mission. The Space program limped along until the 1980's when it was fully funded.

And we just sent more astronauts to the space station on the last Russian flight we will have to pay for. We will finally have American private enterprise launches from here out.

It is great we don't have to pay the Russians anymore to fly us to space.

The Moon has night and day like the Earth. Just takes 28 days for one cycle instead of 24 hours.

+1 Cool. Did not know that.

The Moon does spin on its axis, completing a rotation once every 27.3 days; the confusion is caused because it also takes the same period to orbit the Earth, so that it keeps the same side facing us.


https://moon.nasa.gov/about/misconceptions/

Yep, Pink Floyd made generations of people think there is a dark side of the moon. There simply is not a "dark side" anymore than there is a dark side of the earth. We just call it night.

They meant that water was found on the more intensely sunny part of the moon, not just the poles where the sun angle is very low, like on earth. They knew for a long time that there was water on the poles.