Saswato R. Das: A Permanent Outpost on the Moon?
[Saswato R. Das is a science and technology writer in New York.]
The discovery of a significant amount of water on the Moon, announced recently by NASA, has fired up space enthusiasts and would-be lunar colonists. Building a permanent base on the Moon suddenly seems a lot less daunting...
... But more than anything else, what last week’s discovery underscores is that our instruments are finally coming of age: we are witnessing another golden era of astronomy, when our instruments’ capabilities are beginning to equal those required to test our theories. (Recently, we have also confirmed the existence of black holes and seen planets around other stars; we have found that the universe is speeding up; we have seen the ripples from the beginning of the universe.)
The idea that the Moon has water is not new. In the first century A.D., the Greek historian Plutarch wrote about it in “De Facie de Orb Lunae” (“On the Face of the Moon”), when he hypothesized that the dark areas we see were seas. Four hundred years ago, when Galileo first turned his telescope to the Moon and saw its mountains and craters, he too wondered whether the dark spots were oceans. In “Siderius Nuncius” (“Starry Messenger”), which Galileo published in 1610, he wrote that the Moon’s “brighter part would represent the land surface while its darker part would more appropriately represent the water surface.”
In 1647, after years of observations, Johannes Hevelius published the first lunar map and painted large swaths of the surface blue. Four years later, the Jesuit astronomers Francesco Maria Grimaldi and Giovanni Battista Riccioli published a map of Moon that codified the nomenclature that is still in use, calling the depressions maria or seas.
Over the next two centuries, the idea of a Moon awash with oceans was kept alive by astronomers and authors, from William Herschel (the discoverer of the planet Uranus) to Jules Verne (“From the Earth to the Moon”)...
Read entire article at NYT
The discovery of a significant amount of water on the Moon, announced recently by NASA, has fired up space enthusiasts and would-be lunar colonists. Building a permanent base on the Moon suddenly seems a lot less daunting...
... But more than anything else, what last week’s discovery underscores is that our instruments are finally coming of age: we are witnessing another golden era of astronomy, when our instruments’ capabilities are beginning to equal those required to test our theories. (Recently, we have also confirmed the existence of black holes and seen planets around other stars; we have found that the universe is speeding up; we have seen the ripples from the beginning of the universe.)
The idea that the Moon has water is not new. In the first century A.D., the Greek historian Plutarch wrote about it in “De Facie de Orb Lunae” (“On the Face of the Moon”), when he hypothesized that the dark areas we see were seas. Four hundred years ago, when Galileo first turned his telescope to the Moon and saw its mountains and craters, he too wondered whether the dark spots were oceans. In “Siderius Nuncius” (“Starry Messenger”), which Galileo published in 1610, he wrote that the Moon’s “brighter part would represent the land surface while its darker part would more appropriately represent the water surface.”
In 1647, after years of observations, Johannes Hevelius published the first lunar map and painted large swaths of the surface blue. Four years later, the Jesuit astronomers Francesco Maria Grimaldi and Giovanni Battista Riccioli published a map of Moon that codified the nomenclature that is still in use, calling the depressions maria or seas.
Over the next two centuries, the idea of a Moon awash with oceans was kept alive by astronomers and authors, from William Herschel (the discoverer of the planet Uranus) to Jules Verne (“From the Earth to the Moon”)...