NASA finds a bunch of water on the moon

[mclz]

http://news.aol.com/article/nasa-finds-significant-water-on-moon/766576

It's official: There's water on the moon.

NASA's LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today.

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NASA

A satellite camera shows a plume of debris, circled above, seconds after a rocket smashed into the moon's Cabeus crater on Oct. 9.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount," Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to sustain water frozen at the surface. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India's now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.

The impact was observed by LCROSS's sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.

The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientist had had time to comb through the probe's data.

[monk0nuggets]

Neat!

[murakami]

i love things related to space, but find it a little wasteful to spend $79M to build something thats sole purpose is to be smashed into the surface of the moon.

[kurtz]

[monk0nuggets]

i love things related to space, but find it a little wasteful to spend $79M to build something thats sole purpose is to be smashed into the surface of the moon.

Yeah, that's a little more than ridiculous.

[jhulud]

I downloaded the NASA app for the iPhone a few days ago...it's pretty neat. You get updates on missions and anything.

The app is free by the way.

[steventangent]

But there ain't no whales.

[jurrobear]

But there ain't no whales.

...only one.

[Guest eriathomas]

I can't wait until I can live on the moon, or participate in a space battle (and probably die a horrible death related to space).

[jurrobear]

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[Guest kissthesharks]

Oh man I always wanted one of those!

[captainmorgan]

i love things related to space, but find it a little wasteful to spend $79M to build something thats sole purpose is to be smashed into the surface of the moon.

$79M seems like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, the US spends about $2 billion dollars per week in Iraq. That's 25 times as much. Or, to put it another way, there are about 140 million taxpayers in the US, so it cost about $0.50 a person to fund the research.

And now that we know there's a significant amount of water on the moon, we can probably expect to find it lots of other places. That's pretty awesome.

[saxamaphone]

I'm a space nerd and this is relevant to my interests.

[raistlinn]

I'm a space nerd and this is relevant to my interests.

[faith]

How about instead of wasting money into space we worry about our OWN planet and try and preserve its existing resources?

meh

[scottheisel]

How about instead of wasting money into space we worry about our OWN planet and try and preserve its existing resources?

meh

Canada doesn't have a space program.

[captainmorgan]

How about instead of wasting money into space we worry about our OWN planet and try and preserve its existing resources?

meh

I dunno, I'm definitely biased on this subject (given that my own (small) salary is at this moment paid in large part by NASA), but I think that money spent on basic research is almost never wasted. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, you've got all of the inventions and technology developed as a result. From a more philosophical perspective, surely trying to figure out how the world/universe works is one of humanity's more worthy pursuits, and far less wasteful than, say, blowing each other up or selling crap to each other.

To conclude: The moon! There's water on it! That's crazy!

[xlovecolouredx]

i just watched 2010 and it seems we have 2 years for build a spaceship to the moon if the armageddon day has come....

[captainmorgan]

Canada doesn't have a space program.

Apparently that's not true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Space_Agency

They even have a coat of arms!

[xjustinxschwierx]

I dunno, I'm definitely biased on this subject (given that my own (small) salary is at this moment paid in large part by NASA), but I think that money spent on basic research is almost never wasted. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, you've got all of the inventions and technology developed as a result. From a more philosophical perspective, surely trying to figure out how the world/universe works is one of humanity's more worthy pursuits, and far less wasteful than, say, blowing each other up or selling crap to each other.

To conclude: The moon! There's water on it! That's crazy!

[scotterson]

I dunno, I'm definitely biased on this subject (given that my own (small) salary is at this moment paid in large part by NASA), but I think that money spent on basic research is almost never wasted. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, you've got all of the inventions and technology developed as a result. From a more philosophical perspective, surely trying to figure out how the world/universe works is one of humanity's more worthy pursuits, and far less wasteful than, say, blowing each other up or selling crap to each other.

To conclude: The moon! There's water on it! That's crazy!

Definitely agree. I would certainly rather space research, or almost any research for that matter, get the money than pro athletes, etc...sorry to all the sports fans, i know that's pretty much everybody.

[xxmartinxx]

Hmmm... I wonder why they didn't find it when we landed on the moon. Oh wait... we didn't.

[scottheisel]

Canada doesn't have a space program.

Apparently that's not true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Space_Agency

They even have a coat of arms!

Holy shit, my mind is kind of blown. I was mistaken.

Regardless, Faith is Canadian, not American, and thus, the 50 cents taken out of her taxes isn't being used to fund NASA's potentially society-changing research missions. Maybe she can use those quarters for a nice bag of Fritos or something.

[llamason56]

i'd rather spend 2 billion a week on space than a pointless war for oil