It’s everywhere, it’s on Earth, it’s on moon, soon may be on Mars too. Since we last reported, scientists have found “significant” amounts of water in a crater at the moon’s south pole.
“The moon is alive,” declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.
The mission on Oct. 9 used a rocket to punch a hole about 100 feet across in the moon’s surface to measure amount of water, it came out to be about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice.
NASA plans call for a return to the moon at the end of the next decade and construction of a lunar base where astronauts could live and work for months at a time. The presence of large quantities of water would make that plan more practical, because water could be used for drinking, to produce oxygen for breathing and even to make rocket fuel. A resource-rich moon also could serve as a low-gravity launching pad for missions to elsewhere in the solar system.
“This is painting a surprising new picture of the moon. This is not your father’s moon,” said Greg Delory, a space scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. He referred to the fact that, after the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, the moon was regarded as a dead place with little to offer future explorers.
“What’s really exciting is we’ve only hit one spot,” said Peter Schultz, a geology professor at Brown University and a co-investigator on the mission. “It’s kind of like when you’re drilling for oil. Once you find it in one place, there’s a greater chance you’ll find more nearby.”
Pack your bags coz within next decade we will be traveling to moon, often.
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