Remember when we told you a few weeks back about NASA’s plan to crash a rocket into a lunar crater in order to determine whether or not there was any water on the moon?

Well, turns out the answer is a definitive YES.

According to a NASA LCROSS project scientist: “Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount.”

This is a big development for a couple of reasons. First, having substantial amounts of ice (and therefore water) on the moon could someday lead to a full-time lunar base, which some scientists have speculated could be the first step in visiting more distant planets. In the near term, NASA is already planning to send manned missions back to the moon beginning in 2020, and there’s no telling what having access to “significant amounts” of water could mean to those missions.

Plus, let’s be honest. Finding out that there is water on the moon is just really, really cool.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.