Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water

By ALICIA CHANG (AP)
LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount," said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that's only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

"Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go," said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA's future plans said it doesn't change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

"This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but ... the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain," Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA's lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

As for unmanned exploration, previous missions had detected the presence of hydrogen in lunar craters near the moon's poles, possible evidence of ice. In September, scientists reported finding tiny amounts of water in the lunar soil all over the moon's surface.

But it was NASA's Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation announced Friday — water, in the forms of ice and vapor.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one," said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The LCROSS spacecraft only hit one spot on the moon and it's unclear how much water there is across the entire moon.

The October mission involved two strikes into a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. First, an empty rocket hull slammed into the Cabeus crater. Then, a trailing spacecraft recorded the drama live before it also crashed into the same spot four minutes later.

Though scientists were overjoyed with the plethora of data beamed back to Earth, the mission was a public relations dud. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night to watch the spectacle did not see the promised giant plume of debris.

NASA scientists had predicted the twin impacts would spew six miles of dust into the sunlight. Instead, images revealed only a mile-high plume, and it was not visible to many amateur astronomers peering through telescopes.

Scientists spent a month analyzing data from the spacecraft's spectrometers, instruments that can detect strong signals of water molecules in the plume.

"We've had hints that there is water. This was almost like tasting it," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 made his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk with Neil Armstrong, was pleased to hear the latest discovery, but still believes the U.S. should focus on colonizing Mars.

"People will overreact to this news and say, `Let's have a water rush to the moon,'" Aldrin said. "It doesn't justify that."

Mission scientists said it would take more time to tease out what else was kicked up in the moon dust.

Water on the Moon Confirmed by NASA Crashes

Ker Than
for National Geographic News
It's official: There's water on the moon—and a "significant amount" of it, too, members of NASA's recent moon-crash mission, LCROSS, announced today.

In October, NASA crashed a two-ton rocket and the SUV-size LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) into the permanently shadowed crater Cabeus on the moon's south pole.
The crashes were part of an effort to kick up evidence of water on the moon (picture).

(Read more on the LCROSS mission's moon target.)

Despite disappointing many amateur astronomers on Earth, who had been expecting to see a giant plume of lunar dust and ice crystals, the moon-water mission was a success, NASA says. (See NASA 'Moon Bombing' a Hit, But LCROSS Impact Invisible?")

The LCROSS team took the known near-infrared light signature of water and compared it to the impact spectra LCROSS near-infrared recorded after the probe had sent its spent rocket crashing into the moon.

A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining which wavelengths of light they emit or absorb.

"We got good fits" for the data graphs, said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS's principal investigator, at today's press conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

"We could not put other compounds [in] and generate the same fit."
Water on the Moon—Buckets of It

Additional evidence of water on the moon came from LCROSS's ultraviolet spectrometer, which detected energy signatures associated with hydroxyl, a byproduct of the breakup of water by sunlight.

The amount of moon water kicked up by the LCROSS crashes could fill about a dozen 2-gallon (7.6-liter) buckets, said Colaprete, adding that this is just a conservative estimate.

"Not Your Father's Moon," Water Discovery Suggests

The confirmation of water on the moon raises the possibility that humans may one day be able to extract drinking water or breathable oxygen as well as the raw ingredients for rocket fuel from moon rocks, Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said at the conference.

Samples of water on the moon might also help shed light on the early history and evolution of the solar system, said physicist Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This is not your father's moon," Delory said at the conference.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could be a very dynamic and interesting one."