Diary (January 4, 2021)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Monday January 4, 2021.

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Diary

Black Mail, Milk Pail

Black Mail, Milk Pail—!

Give me your Shoes—!

Walk back my Footprints—!

Erase the Bad News—!

—Gargoyle Nursery Rhymes

I don't always exist

I don't always exist.

But when I do, I always raise a glass to non-being.

To absent friends! And to Jean-Paul Sartre!

The moon is mysteriously rusting, and scientists think it's our fault

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology reports that the moon is rusting. Which sounds weird enough on the surface, but gets even stranger when you consider that the moon doesn't have any oxygen or liquid water—the two things typically required to turn iron and iron-rich rocks into rust.

The mystery starts with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that flows out from the Sun, bombarding Earth and the Moon with hydrogen. Hydrogen makes it harder for hematite to form. It's what is known as a reducer, meaning it adds electrons to the materials it interacts with. That's the opposite of what is needed to make hematite: For iron to rust, it requires an oxidizer, which removes electrons. And while the Earth has a magnetic field shielding it from this hydrogen, the Moon does not.

"It's very puzzling," [Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii] said. "The Moon is a terrible environment for hematite to form in." So he turned to JPL scientists Abigail Fraeman and Vivian Sun to help poke at M3's data and confirm his discovery of hematite.

"At first, I totally didn't believe it. It shouldn't exist based on the conditions present on the Moon," Fraeman said. "But since we discovered water on the Moon, people have been speculating that there could be a greater variety of minerals than we realize if that water had reacted with rocks."

After taking a close look, Fraeman and Sun became convinced M3's data does indeed indicate the presence of hematite at the lunar poles. "In the end, the spectra were convincingly hematite-bearing, and there needed to be an explanation for why it's on the Moon," Sun said.

More research is still needed into this strange phenomenon. But right now, their leading theory is that oxygen from Earth can hitch a ride on the planet's own magnetic field—also known, no joke, as a magnetotail—with enough momentum to travel the 239,000 miles to the Moon. It's possible that the oxygen even made the trip billions of years ago, when the Earth and Moon were closer to one another.

• The moon is mysteriously rusting, and scientists think it's our fault @ Boing Boing

The Moon is Rusting Red as Clay

The Moon is Rusting Red as Clay

Confer "The Moon is Shining Bright as Day"

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles