Los Angeles, November 14, 2009 – Water on the moon, once a wild conjecture, appears to have become an established fact. Jubilant NASA scientists announced Friday that they had found the tell-tale signs of significant quantities of water, in the form of ice and vapor, lurking in a shadowed crater at the moon's south poll.

The discovery came from the double-whammy impact of a rocket and a trailing spacecraft slamming into the Cabeus crater four minutes apart on Oct. 9 and kicking up a plume of material. Instruments aboard the trailing spacecraft, and on another orbiting lunar probe, analyzed the ejected material and saw clear signatures of the equivalent of about 26 gallons worth of water, primarily in the form of vapor.

How much water there may be across the rest of the moon is unclear. But the pole turned out to be a jackpot.

"Can you believe it? Isn't this cool?" said Peter Schultz, a Brown University planetary scientist and team member for a mission called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.

"After the Apollo program ended, we concluded that the moon was dead," Schultz said. "Now what we're seeing is a place with a reservoir of ices that have been collected over billions of years."

"One way of saying it is, this is not your father's moon," said team member Gregory Delory of the University of California at Berkeley.

The spent rocket body created its own crater roughly 60 to 100 feet across. Some of the vapor reached as high as about 25 miles, but most of the material shot out laterally from the impact. The mission had been something of a public relations dud initially because of problems with the live video stream. Amateur astronomers had hoped to see the impact with backyard telescopes, but the mission leaders switched to a different target that put the plume behind a lunar ridge.

But the scientific results are dramatic. The material excavated by the collision contains not only water, but other complex molecules that are still being analyzed and which may offer clues to the origin of the solar system. These shadowed, extremely cold craters on the moon are the solar system's dusty attic, the scientists said.

"Oh my goodness, it's a lot more complicated than we really anticipated," said NASA scientist Anthony Colaprete, the leader of the LCROSS team. "It wasn't just water, there was a lot more interesting stuff in there."

Water on the moon could prove to be a valuable resource for space exploration. Not only could it provide drinking water for astronauts, it could be used to create rocket fuel. NASA's long-term strategy for exploration officially includes a return of astronauts to the moon, but plans are up in the air as the Obama Administration examines alternatives that might include bypassing the moon in the near term.

On the Net:

LCROSS mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/LCROSS/main/index.html

Click here for more images of the results.

Source: The Washington Post, November 13, 2009

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