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A VISION OF TERRAFORMING THE MOON
Although the following is very speculative, a vision, not a "sure thing", the chemical conditions nonetheless do exist to suggest a feasible theory about terraforming the Moon, by using its own surface material, to be ignited with the intense heat of a nuclear bomb.
From materials brought by the Apollo astronauts, it shows that the Moon's surface contains an abundance of Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen, though these elements do not occur in free form on the Moon, but in rather strong chemical bounds in silicates of the regolith.
(regolith = the layer of unconsolidated solid material, covering the bedrock of a planet).
I quote from this NASA page: http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/education/teacher/teacher3.htm
"The nearest star [the Sun] puts out prodigious amounts of particles called the solar wind. Composed mostly of hydrogen, helium, neon, carbon, and nitrogen, the solar wind particles strike the lunar surface and are implanted into mineral grains. The same solar wind gases may prove useful when people establish permanent settlements on the Moon. Life support systems require the life-giving elements: hydrogen and oxygen (for water), carbon, and nitrogen. Plenty of oxygen is bound in the silicate, minerals of lunar rocks (about 50% by volume) and the solar wind provided the rest. "
and from this page: http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcglobal/9resthi8.html"
"..... Hydrous minerals do contain water, but it is so tightly bound chemically to the crystals that it would take temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (815 Celsius) to break those bonds and extract useful water, he said ."
There is the dream to terraform the Moon, giving it an atmosphere. Those who think that the Moon's gravity is too little to hold a dense atmosphere, should compare with one of Saturn's moons, Titan. It has a nitrogen atmosphere (98%, compare to 80% for Earth), where the atmospheric pressure on ground level is one and a half times larger(!) than on Earth, while Titan's gravity (0.14 G) is lower than our moon's gravity (0.165 G). Surely, Titan is very cold and thus the gas molecules move so slow that they can't escape?
A Moon atmosphere would be much warmer, but then look at Venus, that has about the same size and gravity as Earth, but at surface level a 90 times higher atmospheric pressure and at a very high temperature (400 °C - lead would melt in it). Hence, there is no sure reason to assume that our moon cannot hold a dense atmosphere. The situations on Titan and Venus show that there is a good chance. In fact, it isn't known what mechanisms actually hold a planet's atmosphere; clearly, temperature and gravity are not the only factors. Possibly the way in which an atmosphere was formed, has great significance also.
But the size of such a project, to form an atmosphere on the Moon, is gigantic. Just imagine that on Earth presently around 80 million barrels of oil are burned PER DAY (1 barrel is 167 liter = 40 gallons), plus double the equivalent in coal, each kilogram of it needing in average around 10 qbm (10,000 liter = 250 gallons) of air to burn, all being converted to harmful gases in our atmosphere and we still can breath! (see also "Spaceship Earth"). Hence, producing an equivalent amount of gases on the Moon in the same rate, provided we would have an energy source for it, would take millennia before any atmosphere of significance could be formed that way.
However, if the Moon's regolith is locally heated hot enough to break the bonds that hold Hydrogen and Oxygen in the silicates (an endothermic process), they would form Oxyhydrogen and fuse to water (steam) directly afterwards. We can read here:
http://www.primetals.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=38&Itemid=37
"Oxyhydrogen is a mixture of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) gases. Oxyhydrogen will combust when brought to its autoignition temperature. For a stoichiometric mixture at normal atmospheric pressure, autoignition occurs at about 570 °C (1065 °F). At normal temperature and pressure, oxyhydrogen can burn when it is between about 4% and 95% hydrogen by volume.
When ignited, the gas mixture converts to water vapor and releases energy, which sustains the reaction: 241.8 kJ of energy (LHV) for every mole of H2 burned. The amount of heat energy released is independent of the mode of combustion, but the temperature of the flame varies. The maximum temperature of about 2800 °C is achieved with a pure stoichiometric mixture, about 700 degrees hotter than a hydrogen flame in air. When either of the gases are mixed in excess of this ratio, or when mixed with an inert gas like nitrogen, the heat must spread throughout a greater quantity of matter and the temperature will be lower."
We see from this that Oxyhydrogen is very explosive and so the chance for chemical fusion is very high and more energy would then be released in this exothermic fusion process than what was absorbed in the endothermic one to break the bonds in the silicates. This difference in endo- and exothermic energy could thus cause a chemical chain reaction, spreading over the whole Moon's surface. In this way, the Moon itself would provide the billions of tons of "air" needed to form a dense atmosphere.
HOWEVER, the process would initially have to occur at very low pressures, close to vacuum, and for this condtion there is nothing in the literature - of course not. Likely no chain-reaction can occur at such low pressures and that's why even large meteor impacts, never had any such effect on the Moon, or just during a rather short time, after which the chemical fusion process died out. Therefore we need a nuclear bomb on the ground, yielding a fire ball that is millions of degrees hot and by that can heat, virtually melt the rock deep under the highly dense packed regoltith, making it a layer of solid, or even liquid very hot material, in which the chain reaction can be maintained and spread out over larger and larger regions beneath the uppper regolith layer. We then would not see a "fire front", but an atmosphere 'evaporating' out of the "dark" ground.
Now, don't say that a thus formed lunar atmosphere would be 'radioactive'. Many previous test explosions of nuclear megaton bombs in the Earth's atmosphere have showed not to do this. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki are flourishing societies today.
An interesting experiment, in support of the above, has been made by professor Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at Tennessee, as I quote from here:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6460089.stm)
"I discovered that if you put lunar soil in your microwave oven, next to your tea, it will melt at 1200 °C before your tea boils - which is a magical thing,"
and here: http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_moondust_060223.html
"He [Taylor] once put a small pile of lunar soil, brought back by Apollo astronauts, into a microwave oven. Taylor found that it melted rapidly, within 30 sec, at only 250 W. The reason it melted so quickly has to do with its composition. Lunar regolith, or soil, is produced when micrometeorites plow into lunar rocks and sand at high-impact velocities, melting and creating glass. The glass contains nanometer-scale beads of pure iron, so-called "nanophase" iron. Those tiny iron beads efficiently concentrate microwave energy, causing the beads to "sinter," or fuse the loose soils into large clumps."
May be so, but 250 Watt is just 250 Watt and more the regolith can't have got, actually quite much less, as he boiled tea at the same time, the more as water is an extremely good absorber of microwaves. The high temperature of 1200 °C says nothing about the energy involved to melt the material. Reaching that temperature very fast, may have had to do with the nanophase iron, but IF that regolith contained just a little Hydrogen and Oxygen that fused on its release inside the material, that would have delivered the extra energy for the fast melting process. In fact, the fusion (combustion) energy of Hydrogen and Oxygen is a whole 120 MJoule per kg of formed water (equals a power of 4 MW during 30 sec, enough to heat up around 4000 flat irons simultaneously). Hence, the fast melting of the material in Taylor's microwave oven wouldn't be that 'magical' at all. For me, his experiment is a strong indicator for the correctness of my theory!
If a chain reaction would be the result, just one nuclear bomb could be detonated anywhere on the Moon's surface, after which an expanding ring-shaped chemical reaction front would "scrub" the Moon's whole surface, 'consuming' all the surface regolith, as well as forming a dense atmosphere at the same time, containing much water vapor, free Nitrogen and Oxygen - an Earthlike atmosphere!
Most of the water vapor will condense to rain and form lakes, rivers and possibly even oceans. In Phoptoshop I modified a photo of the moon, to show in the image to the left how it in the end could look like. The 14 earthdays moonday-night-cycle causes strong whirl-winds from the warm day-side to the cold night-side, leveling out the temperature differences. The central part of the day-side would be rather wind still. Heavy rains on the night-side, dry weather on the day-side. (the video presentation is not mine btw).
The Sun would maintain a water loop between surface and atmosphere, just as it does on Earth. This terraforming process could complete all by itself and rather fast, depending on the speed of the reaction front and at no additional efforts, other than bringing seeds there later, to create vegetation during the next decades. The first settlers will be farmers and foresters! One could speculate if the same can be done on Mars also? In practical terms its atmosphere is close to a vacuum (6 mbar pressure only), so it would be needed.
Of course, it may take a century and longer until the Moon becomes the green planet, as envisioned in the model here, but we can live there meanwhile. Of course, we lack the necessary input data to make process calculations on this. Such a calculation would therefore be based on a large number of assumed parameters, making the result not worth more than what these assumptions are, wild guesses for most of them. The only way to find out for sure what is the case, would be just to do it - drop a nuclear bomb on the surface and see what happens.
Ah, one might say, something similar just happened recently, by deliberately crashing the LCROSS satellite into a moon crater and nothing much happened. Indeed, too little happened, because a six-mile plume of lunar dust material was expected to result. It became much less and naturally so, because the "dust" is extremely heavily packed, due to the absence of air molecules between the particles, far more compact than an however strong press machine on Earth, say in the Sahara, could achieve. The Apollo astronauts could only drill a few inches into the ground, so hard it was beneath. Hence, the energy of the crash was for the greater part converted to surface heat, as it could not penetrate deeper into the hard ground, not enough to raise the temperature of the impact area from minus 200 to plus 1200 °C (it would have needed explosives for that).
However, on a terraformed Moon, the envisioned "ideal" Lunar State would likely not be possible, but become a copy of the violence and war plagued societies on Earth, because oppressive groups and individuals could hide anywhere to do their disastrous work (like for example Al Queda and Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan). Do we really want this to happen? If a nuke would indeed terraform the Moon, we might as well forget about the Lunar Union, so we might praise ourselves lucky if it would not be possible ..