According to today's paper scientist feel they have discovered a meteor that could have been 30 miles wide buried under the land surface in Antarctica. It is suspected that this meteor could have caused the greatest mass extinction in history - 250 million years back.

The question I would like to ask is, similar meteors (asteroids) must be buried under the surface of the Moon. Could we obtain our Carbon and Hydrogen from these?

Selvaraj

> From: sraj
> The question I would like to ask is, similar meteors
> (asteroids) must be buried under the surface of the Moon.
> Could we obtain our Carbon and Hydrogen from these?

Make that 'remains of asteroid'. Upon impact it would have been vaporised. I
believe the vast majority of it (along with the surrounding rock) would have
then exploded upwards. The problem is that any hydrogen not immediately
bound up in chemical reactions would have not come down again. Carbon might
be found if you dig deep enough at some craters, but I think it won't be in
the concentrated form its found in on earth.

John

I was under the impression that carbonaceous asteroids would contain plenty of carbon, and also hydrogen in the form of hydrocarbons. Burn hydrocarbons using the plentiful supply of oxygen in the Moon's crust and you will obtain water and CO2.

This is what I found about 1998KY26 asteroid, 100 feet in dia, which passed within 500,000 miles of Earth in 1998 ... "This asteroid is thought to be loaded with water, but the water is bound to organic chemicals, possibly including such basic building blocks of life as amino acids and nucleic acids. There is no life on KY26, but the basics for sustaining life could be there."

It is a pity that we are still not sure that there is water on the Moon. See this NASA site:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14apr_moonwater.htm

I was surprised to learn that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter may contain more water than earth!!

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050907_ceres_planet.html

Selvaraj

John wrote:

> From: sraj
> The question I would like to ask is, similar meteors
> (asteroids) must be buried under the surface of the Moon.
> Could we obtain our Carbon and Hydrogen from these?

Make that 'remains of asteroid'. Upon impact it would have been vaporised. I
believe the vast majority of it (along with the surrounding rock) would have
then exploded upwards. The problem is that any hydrogen not immediately
bound up in chemical reactions would have not come down again. Carbon might
be found if you dig deep enough at some craters, but I think it won't be in
the concentrated form its found in on earth.

John

On 6/20/06, sraj wrote:
(...)
> I was under the impression that carbonaceous asteroids would contain plenty of carbon, and also hydrogen in the form of hydrocarbons. Burn hydrocarbons using the plentiful supply of oxygen in the Moon's crust and you will obtain water and CO2.

The problem, as John pointed, is that the heat of thousands of degrees
characteristic of asteroid impacts would likely vaporize most of the
volatiles. Even though, I believe that traces of volatiles will still
be found in some impact sites - simply because there *are*
carbonaceous meteors found on Earth that still conserved volatiles in
their porous structure even after atmospheric entry/impact. Since the
rest of the Moon is basically devoid of volatiles (taking aside
rock-locked oxygen), I think that even those trace volatiles will have
their value.

(...)
> I was surprised to learn that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter may contain more water than earth!!
(...)

That is not so surprising considering how cold Ceres is.

As a side comment, under my preferred criterion for defining planet -
a body orbiting a sun and with gravity enough to be spherical - Ceres
is a planet, not an asteroid.