4 ms·
> A "back of the envelope" calculation suggested that there could be around a third of a trillion tonnes of water inside all the Moon's glass beads. Interestin
by A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
> A "back of the envelope" calculation suggested that there could be around a third of a trillion tonnes of water inside all the Moon's glass beads.
Interestingly, this may be terrible news for the future of lunar structural materials. It was assumed that glass processed from lunar raw materials would be totally anhydrous, due to the absence of water on the moon's surface. Anhydrous glass is orders of magnitude stronger than regular glass, and could make for extremely strong fiberglass parts and other structural components. This was examined in a 1985 NASA paper titled "Mechanical Properties of Lunar Materials Under Anhydrous, Hard Vacuum Conditions: Applications of Lunar Glass Structural Components" at: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985lbsa.conf..487B https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985lbsa.conf..487B
It'll certainly be interesting to see what the future brings.
- rini17 4y agoBut what mass fraction is that really? If it's only few ppm it won't affect structural applications.
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoBack-of-napkin calculation suggests that it would be ~20 ppm if it were evenly distributed. But as any water is likely concentrated in surface rock and dust, it might be substantially more than that. Still, it may be possible to mine deep water-poor silicates and oxides and process them in a water-free hard-vacuum environment. Time will tell, I guess! Lunar fiberglass is still a highly speculative thing. (But extremely cool, at least in principle, due to its superlative strength and toughness.)