Note from Dave:
I have to wonder if they looked at and found any of Hoagland's anomolies ?? After all, Clementine looked at a HUGE percentage of the surface.
Given that NASA has agreed to take a look at "The Face", why would the Government not also feel there may be some merit to his claims about the Moon, and have taken a look ?
Following this logic, if they didn't find anything one would think they'd jump
on the oportunity to discredit Hoagland's ideas. On the other hand if they
DID find something it follows their silence on all the other data the got
is understandable.
"Silence is Golden"
(as in Dan Golden, sorry I couldn't help myself)
DAVE
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Pentagon says it may have discovered ice on the moon
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Copyright c 1996 Nando.net
Copyright c 1996 Reuter Information Service
WASHINGTON (Dec 2, 1996 9:01 p.m. EST) - A military spacecraft may have
found ice on the moon and the discovery could resolve the decades-old
debate among scientists about whether there is water on the lunar surface.
The Defense Department said Monday if the findings from its Clementine mission were confirmed, it was possible a self-sustaining, permanent colony could be established on the moon.
There has long been disagreement among scientists over the origin and makeup of the moon, whether there is water, and whether the planet has a hot interior. Past missions found rock so dry that they were formed in regions that never had water.
But the Pentagon spacecraft bounced radio waves into a deep crater on the lunar surface and the resulting images showed that ice "likely makes up part of the moon's surface layer near the south pole," the Defense Department said. The possible ice deposits near the south pole suggested enough water to fill a pond or small lake is in that area. The Pentagon speculated the water probably came from comets.
"Water molecules hitting the moon from comets might migrate by random hops into cold traps close to absolute zero in permanently dark areas of the moon in that region," the Pentagon said in a fact sheet prepared for the Tuesday briefing.
"The discovery of ice deposits near the lunar south pole has important ramifications for a permanent return to the moon," the department said.
"These deposits could be used for rocket propellant and for life support consumables to bootstrap a self-sustaining lunar colony."
It said the characteristics of the radio waves bounced into the crater from the spacecraft Clementine and received by large dish antennas on earth indicate the ice.
The crater known as the South Pole-Aitkin basin is the largest and deepest discovered in the solar system, about 1,500 miles in diameter and up to 8 miles deep.
"Once captured, a water molecule has no known way of escaping the cold trap."
The Pentagon said the total area of permanent darkness near the south pole was about twice the size of Puerto Rico and the Clementine data suggests almost 1 percent of that is pure ice.
"Scientists cannot determine the thickness of these deposits of lunar ice, but they are likely to be several meters (yards) thick," the Pentagon estimated.
Because the moon is small and has low gravity and high daytime temperatures, most water in comets hitting it had broken up into oxygen and hydrogen or escaped into space, it said.
Oxygen and hydrogen are prime rocket fuel and water and oxygen generated from lunar ice could support a permanent outpost on the moon.
The Clementine spacecraft is operated by the Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and its science team is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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