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Post by LunarOrbit on Sept 29, 2009 19:23:44 GMT -4
It might not have been the same scientists, but it was all funded by NASA. And they didn't say "it must be contamination because there CAN'T be water on the Moon." They were saying "it's more likely to be contamination because there is water everywhere on Earth and it hasn't been proven to be on the Moon."
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Post by echnaton on Sept 30, 2009 11:41:33 GMT -4
I know, but he is our troll and we can't let him starve.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Sept 30, 2009 12:27:07 GMT -4
Is it calling us a troll, precious? Such nice names the silly hobbitses have for us, oh yes, such nice names, precious! Gollum! Gollum!
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Post by Jason Thompson on Oct 1, 2009 4:21:58 GMT -4
If some scientists declared that the water found on Apollo samples must have been conatmination since their theories say there can be no water on the moon, but other scientists aren't so sure and keep looking, then we have scientists acting both dogmatically and skeptically. That's a big 'if'. So far I have seen no evidence that the water found on Apollo samples was dismissed as contamination on the basis of any assumption that water couldn't be there. What I have seen is an inability to eliminate contamination as a source of the tiny amounts of water found. So, when confronted with rocks that show no evidence of water in their chemical makeup, a set of conditions that doesn't allow water to exist on the surface in sunlit regions in any significant quantity as far as we know, and a testing environment that can't be considered totally free of water contamination, as a scientist the responsible thing to do is not to annouce there is water on the Moon but to try to rule out contamination as a cause. If you can't do that you can't conclude there is water on the Moon. This is not dogma, this is science. The latest data is conclusive because it's looking at stuff still in place, and never having been to an environment where contamination by the testing setup can be responsible. Now we can say that there is water on the Moon, and re-analyse the Apollo samples in light of that new information.
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Post by gonetoplaid on Oct 3, 2009 12:33:22 GMT -4
Exactly. Anyone with any experience in surface physics will tell you about the problems of the science and removing contamination. Surface physicists work in ultra high-vacuum, spending all there time baking their chambers to get rid of unwanted species. Water is their biggest enemy as it sticks to pretty much everything. I would assume that when the moon rocks were originally analyzed, they would have been very concerned about water, not only primary contamination, but any secondary contamination from the testing method they were using. If I am correct, the NASA scientists who tested the Apollo rocks found water, but dismissed the results as contamination [BBC this morning]. Is this correct? Of course, the animals at ZooTube have gone mad. They say this is the final nail in Apollo's coffin, as the original rock analysis said there was no water. Of course, they work on the assumption that the water found recently is uniformly distributed, and I have yet to see evidence of this.[/quote]
Well said. You can bake and dry nitrogen purge a test chamber for days and still not get rid of all the water contamination in it.
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