I somehow had the impression that hydrogen and nitrogen are in short supply on the moon. Today I read something about carbonaceous chondrites containing a lot of hydrogen, and I presume a lot of nitrogen. The CHON of "chondrites" comes from the atomic symbols for Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. A lot of this comes in the form of hydrocarbons. All sorts of meteorites impact on the moon and contribute materials. There have to be significantly large deposits somewhere on the moon where carbonaceous chondrites have landed. You would think, since this is a very common kind of asteroid, that all you have to do is look for the right zenoliths. Any place where there is an intrusion of rock foreign to its surroundings, there is a chance that it is the type of chondrite rock that we are looking for. Iron is useful. Titanium and aluminum are useful. On the moon the most useful rock is the kind that contains hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, not necessarily in that order Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! So I am suggesting that these vital elements that we think are short on the moon exist in the broken remains of asteroids. This is on a surface that is nothing but craters and impact-related debris. If carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen have been baked out of the soils, they might not have been baked out of rocks, especially those buried in the soil. So what we really need is to search for big pieces that have broken off of the right type of asteroid. We might even be able to locate them on Hubble photographs, and the Hubble is doing that kind of survey. Roll them in, grind them up, process them, and we have what we need. Also, very frankly, I find it hard to believe that even under the conditions that exist on the moon, there is zero carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen in the soils. How deep did they dig? Does it bake out of the soil at the surface, and will digging a few feet turn up the CHN elements in the soil, making it less necessary to search far and wide? A side issue that I noticed is that lunar soils seem to have unacceptably high levels of lead, in the hundreds of parts per million. We may have difficulty growing plants that are safe to eat in lunar soil. Also, I notice that there is enough sulfur and potassium oxide to account for the "burnt gunpowder" smell I've read about. In fact, the percentages should give it a fairly strong odor. It also contains fair amounts of oxides of potassium and sodium oxides, enough to make it irritatingly alkaline. link Another related thought is that whenever we start colonizing the moon, we need to buy a few pounds each of rare earths and trace elements to take up there to manufacture electronics with. It doesn't take much tellurium to manufacture a lot of LEDs, and it takes very little arsenic per computer chip. Just a thought. Wouldn't want a colony to be stuck entirely without something that is very easy to pack when we send the first ships up there.
