2011, Latest Papers, Authors A-M

Water on The Moon, I. Historical Overview

By Arlin Crotts   Sun, Sep 18, 2011

ABSTRACT
By mid-19th century, astronomers strongly suspected that the Moon was largely dry and airless, based
on the absence of any observable weather. [1] In 1892, William H. Pickering made a series of careful
occultation measurements that allowed him to conclude that the lunar surface’s atmospheric pressure
was less than 1/4000th of Earth’s. [2] Any number of strange ideas arose to contradict this, including
Danish astronomer/mathematician Peter Andreas Hansen’s hypothesis, that the Moon’s center of mass
is offset by its center of figure by 59 kilometers, meaning that one or two scale-heights of atmosphere
could hide on the far side of the Moon, where it might support water oceans and life. [3] Hans
Hörbiger’s 1894 Welteislehre (“World Ice”) theory, that the Moon and much of the cosmos is composed
of water ice, became the favored cosmology of leaders of Third Reich Germany. [4] Respectable scientists
realized that significant amounts of water on the Moon’s surface would rapidly sublime into the
vacuum.

By Arlin Crotts

Department of Astronomy, Columbia University 538 West 120th Street 704 Pupin Hall MC 5255 New York,
NY 10027