Moon Contains Huge Amounts of Water

Last year's LCROSS mission was launched to determine whether water exists at the moon's poles did show that the moon does indeed contain water, but later research shows how far off NASA was in how much there was!

The plume kicked up by the rocket, slamming into the Cabeus crater, contained a startling forty one gallons of water, almost twice what was originally suggested.

From the Yahoo article:

• NASA Ames Research Center (scientists) calculates there could be 1 billion gallons of water in the crater that was hit — enough to fill 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Of course the scientist's enthusiasm is metered by the knowledge that there are no plans to return to the moon in the foreseeable future.

Yahoo article from sent in by Tim Sayell here

No Cheese, but there IS H2O on Luna!

CNN reports that NASA's LCROSS has indeed turned up water on the moon! Preliminary data collected from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite's October 9th impact, indicates a significant amount of water in the plume thrown up by the impactor.

Project scientist Anthony Colaprete, stated that the amount of water contained in the impact plume was about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls. This could be significantly good news for any future long term facilities to be self sufficient - when it comes to fuel and water, two of the most expensive commodities to transport from Earth to orbit and to the Moon.

CNN article

Impactor plume photographed!

Shaun Saunder sends in an article from Newscientist that show the first image, taken by the trailing spacecraft, of lunar material kicked up by the impact of NASA's LCROSS mission.

Initially it was hoped that the impactor would kick up a plum that could be seen by telescopes on Earth. No plume was visible to Earth based scopes or even Hubble. Ejecta from the impact would have had to rise better than a half mile above the surface for it to be visible but most of the material stayed well below that altitude. Luckily the LCROSS craft was flying right behind the imactor stage. As such the ejecta had only to rise half as high.

Of course there was some bad communication as well. From the article:

• ...mission members said they expected the plume to reach no higher than about 10 km. But projectile experiments carried out on Earth weeks before the impact suggested the plume might reach far lower altitudes.

What possibly may not have been taken into account initially was that the impactor was hollow giving it a very of very low density. Therefor far less energy than expected was transfered to the site. A large portion of that energy was transferred back into the impactor , crumpling it. (as the article puts it, much like the crumple zones in today's cars)