It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.

"If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the three studies in Science on the lunar find, in a statement. "This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it."

Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

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i hope it tastes like ramune.

 

by the time [they] discovered usable water and fuel, we will all be dead

 

actually, the concentration/amount discovered is really reeeeeeeeeeeeelly small............
so small, that the driest desert on Earth has higher concentration than what they discover, people have to read more carefully on the scienitific papers...sometimes.

to extract the water in large enough and useful amounts will required large amount of energy.

 

finding traces of water on the surface of the moon is a pretty big thing... many possibilities on how and why it is present and whether the moon is capable of sustaining habitable bases in the future of course

 

It contain hydrogen and oxygen.