UlanBatori wrote:The whole purpose of Vikram and Pragyan was to determine water if there was water in the lunar soil and H3. This science discovery was a loss not just for India, but the whole of humanity.
I will respectfully diss the veteran Expert who said that yesterday during the run-up on Republic TV. Probably jinxed the lander so much that even Dilbullah's spell could not shake that jinx.
Desis in general and ISRO in particular should emphatically
at both these notions. Just think a bit:
There may be a tiny bit of "water" in the lunar pole craters. IF it is there (we will get to that..) it is because some comets etc crashed deep enough into the moon that not all the water was vaporized/dissociated and expelled into Space. Near the south polar region there are craters with high enough walls that sunlight never reaches into the crater bottom, so those **VERY FEW**** places MAY still have some "water", present as ice particles at some 50K or whatever the lunar sub-soil temperature is. If it is present, it is a ***PRECIOUS*** resource, that has probably been there for Billions and Billions of years, from a time when comets would regularly crash into the Moon or Earth's atmosphere.
True, this is scientifically important. But most emphatically, it is **NOT** a place to excavate and plunder mindlessly, nor is it a place to steal this irreplaceable resource for (would u believe it!!) "making rocket fuel for trips to Mars and Beyond".
This water ice, like all things beyond Earth, is the "Common Heritage of All Humankind". NOT for plundering. For people in a nation that is PC-ness Incarnate, decrying Colonial Exploitation and Destruction of Native Ecology, screaming about Climate Change and Sustainability, allowing cattle, monkeys, pigs and dogs proliferate on the streets in the name of Respect 4 Nature, to argue to plunder this irreplaceable resource mindlessly, is just mind-boggling in its complete pakiness.
OK, now why do I say that there MAY be water? Wasn't it conclusively demonstrated by Chandrayaan-1 crashing into the south Pole? I think that is excusable once, but it is like "detecting" the temple under the Babri Masjid ruins, by exploding POKHRAN-3 there.
Oh yes! THERE goes a trace of bronze vapor in the mushroom cloud! Had to be from *******'s breastplate, just like seen in the "MB" serial.
COULD it have been because someone tossed a half-bottle of Dasani under the solar panel of CY-1 and forgot, like desis do at wedding parties? OK, Just Kidding....
CY-2 was supposed to be much more gentle, just landing one lander slowly, kicking up some gravel and stones, then sending out a 1cm/sec Rover to collect and examine samples.
Second: the He-3. This is far more bogus than the Polar Water. What exactly is the "promise"? That ONE DAY, it will become possible to run controlled fusion reactors using Helium-3. On a power reactor scale. This would create a market demand for Helium-3, which is a rare isotope, very expensive to generate on Earth. SOOOO expensive that it may pay to mine and extract and bottle it and ship it from the Moon!!!!
At that cost, is it worth having fusion power? Has anyone shown the calculation?
How exactly does one extract lunar He-3? By open-pit mining, scraping the lunar surface down to say 10 meter depth over hundreds or thousands of square kilometers, completely destroying all surface features that might yield scientific data. Then processing the whole "regolith" through machines to extract all the minerals and the volatiles. Then dumping the remails, somewhere, maybe in a crater.
In short, COMPLETELY trashing the lunar surface, all history. And ISRO, dedicated to scientific progress, is arguing that **THIS** was the point of the Vikram and its rover? Then perhaps the Moon reached up and slapped Vikram down?
It is sad to see scientifically and technically educated people parroting such mindless garbage on TV or the Internet.