Hey wook
you have to give mesome catch up time ..sheesh
Too busy
The gold stuff is great.
I do not think we posted this here.
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0019.htmlThe crust of the planet Mars may hold two to three times more water than scientists had previously believed.
Deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen, combines with oxygen to make "heavy" water.
In today's thin Martian atmosphere, water has a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio
five times higher than is found in water on Earth.
It could imply that comets, which share the same deuterium to hydrogen ration as martian interior water, supplied most of the water found on Mars today.
http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1000455colliding gold ions with deuterium ions
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory are continuing their quest for an elusive form of matter, but this time with a twist -- instead of colliding gold ions at nearly the speed of light in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), they are colliding gold ions with deuterium ions in an attempt to help unravel the mystery.
In deuterium-gold collisions, while the two nuclei collide with the same high velocity (nearly the speed of light), the total energy of the collision is much lower, and the interaction takes place within the cold nuclear material of the gold nucleus. The scientists hope the differences they see in jet-quenching behaviors between hot matter and cold nuclei will provide additional evidence of quark-gluon plasma formation.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nu ... apter5.pdf.
NUCLEAR PHYSICS: THE CORE OF MATTER, THE FUEL OF STARS
Neutron Stars
They typically contain about 1.5 times the mass of the Sun, packed into a sphere
only 10 kilometers in radius.
Solid metallic iron, with the lowest energy per nucleon of all forms of matter,
constitutes the outer surface of neutron stars.
features.
Thus, a teaspoon of neutron-star matter would have the same mass as a cubic kilometer of matter on Earth.
There is a maximum mass for neutron stars;
compact objects exceeding this maximum value collapse under their own gravity
into black holes.
For example, when sufficiently compressed, the nuclei of this matter
could join to form thin and long spaghetti nuclei, which in turn might merge at
even higher densities into thin flat sheets of “lasagne.”
Finally, at a density of
about 10-14g/cc, the nuclei are fully dissolved
and matter becomes a nuclear fluid.
The evolution of the matter traced above—from solid iron to fluid—occurs as one descends through the crust of a neutron star, a layer about one kilometer in thickness.
The neutron gas in this crust is believed to be superfluid, and the puzzling phenomena of glitches, i.e., sudden speedups observed in the rotational
periods of neutron stars, are likely due to the transfer of angular momentum from
the superfluid to the remainder of the crust.
The crust is solid metallic iron, while the outer core is a neutron gas, with a small admixture of protons and electrons.
At the extreme densities characterizing the inner core, many exotic forms of
nuclear matter—pion or kaon condensates,
quark droplets, or a quark-gluon plasma—
could exist.
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mars gold ?
http://www.marstoday.com/viewpr.html?pid=14370By summer 2005, researchers in the Fluids Research Laboratory at Virginia Tech will be able to look for evidence of water on Mars by examining submicroscopic bubbles in martian meteorites, determine whether fluids and silicate melts trapped in volcanic rock can help predict future eruptions, and locate buried mineral deposits using data from surface rocks
Major Research Instrumentation grant from the NSF to purchase an "Excimer-laser Based Laser Ablation System coupled to an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS)." "It is the single most important analytical method for those studying the geochemistry of Earth fluids,"
Bodnar's early work on fluid inclusions involved studies of extinct volcanoes that host some of the world's largest copper and gold deposits.
Bodnar is searching martian meteorites for samples of fluid inclusion, which are rare in these extraterrestrial samples. He and his graduate student, Megan Elwood Madden, a native of Jacksonville, Ill., are creating geochemical computer models to predict what fluids would have been on Mars at the time the rocks now comprising the meteorites were formed. "Our findings would help answer questions regarding the presence of water on Mars, which is crucial for the development and survival of life," Bodnar said.
Madden, a Ph.D. student with funding from the NSF VTAdvance program, is examining fluid inclusions in other space material as well as in terrestrial meteorite impact sites, including Meteor Crater in Arizona. Previous studies of meteorites indicate that Earth is not so unique, as fluid inclusions indicate that water has been present on other bodies in the solar system at some time in their history
Bodnar's focus is porphyry copper deposits, which include the famous Bingham Canyon, Utah, and Butte, Mont., deposits, although he has studied gold deposits related to volcanoes as well (reported in The Economist Oct. 21, 1995). "One to two kilometers below the top of a volcano, as the magma chamber cools, minerals precipitate. Later, the volcano is eroded to reveal these deposits. When I study these deposits, I am studying the 'fossil' of a volcano," Bodnar said.
"There are thousands of fossil (or extinct) volcanoes worldwide, but only a few have concentrations of metals that can be mined. Why? Fluid inclusions offer the key to answering this question," Bodnar said.
As molten magma cools and crystallizes, water enters and is heated. What happens at this "magmatic hydrothermal, or hot-water, transition determines whether or not an ore deposit forms, he said. "We want to analyze melt inclusions and fluid inclusions that formed at the same time to try to understand what happens to the chemistry within the magma chamber as the system evolves from the magmatic stage to the hot-water stage."
"The few LA-ICP-MS analyses of fluid inclusions that have been made provide information on the amount of metal that is dissolved in natural, ore-forming fluids, and analyses of melt and sulfide inclusions are providing important insights on the geochemistry of incompatible elements during magmatic crystallization," said Kesler. "Preliminary data are challenging well established concepts and are likely to lead to completely new theories about the processes that form mineral deposits and other geochemical anomalies in the upper crust."
Laser Ablation Analysis of Fluid Inclusions at Virginia Tech to explore rocks hundreds of millions of years old for knowledge ranging from how copper and gold deposits formed to the opportunities for life across the solar system.
When minerals form on Mars or deep in a volcano on Earth, small droplets of fluid, vapor, or silicate may be trapped. These tiny, ancient samples contain the rock's chemical history and represent time capsules from the moment they were sealed in a rocky envelope
Current knowledge indicates that if Mars were smooth and all it's ice and permafrost melted into liquid water, the entire planet would be covered with an ocean over 100 meters deep.
Mars has every required element in abundance. Moreover, on Mars, as on Earth, hydrologic and volcanic processes have occurred, which is likely to have concentrated various elements into local concentrations of high-grade mineral ore. Indeed, the geologic history of Mars has been compared with that of Africa7, with very optimistic inferences as to its mineral wealth implied as a corollary.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/133/2Utilizing ET wealth: building a new world
<< page 1: introduction
Utilizing asteroid wealth
Microprobes, tiny probes packed with cutting edge computer and scientific instrument technology, are the necessary link to the information-processing revolution that would allow mankind to quickly tap the vast wealth beyond Earth. By sending a microprobe to a near-Earth asteroid and using the same instruments and techniques employed in purely scientific missions, remotely assaying an asteroid could reveal its amount of precious metals: gold, silver, platinum, etc.
The idea is to simply assay the asteroid, leave the metals in situ, and use that acknowledged wealth to support projects.
According to Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation, one medium- to large-sized nickel-iron body (nickel-irons may contain up to a quarter of the total material making up the near-Earth population) would potentially contain more precious metal than has been mined in all human history. Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, chief of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an investigator on NASA’s highly successful NEAR Shoemaker mission to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros, also says assaying an asteroid is possible. He is not ready to put a number on the amount of precious metals that may be found, however. Yeomans’ caution is important to note, not least because the investigation of Eros is a model of how assay missions would be conducted.
Still, if an average asteroid had several trillion dollars in precious metals, which is entirely possible, according to Tumlinson in a 2000 exchange, that lode could be used to underwrite, conservatively, several hundred billion dollars for projects of various kinds. That potential for good is from one average nickel-iron asteroid. Dr. Yeomans, with his experience at Eros, holds that by using techniques involving x-ray and gamma ray penetration of a body, plus other well-understood techniques, a precise inventory of the metals within can be established. Once confident in the validity of the results, conservative estimates could give way to higher dollar amounts of value.
Clearly, such a plan would work only if all nations agreed that the extraterrestrial wealth did in fact belong to humanity as a whole, but, after all, that is the current law. Clearly, too, the world’s central bankers should have a say in establishing precisely what constitutes “proof of resource” in a remote assay, since they will be responsible for integrating this truly added value into the human economy.
As a side benefit of this approach, if the bankers decided a human-conducted assay of one asteroid was necessary, to establish a baseline for later robotic assays, such a mission would be an ideal bridge between a short lunar trip and a long voyage to Mars. It would also serve as a deep-space test of technologies being considered for use on future Mars ships.
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