LCROSS crashed into the Moon and kicked up a watery plume…
The Moon is Wet!
Moon Crash Reveals Water
Significant Water found on the Moon
…there are hints from the plume’s spectral signature of other chemicals, probably comet like stuff like carbon dioxide, methanol, cyanide etc. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Now we know it’s there what can we do with it? The permanently shaded craters are a forbidding environment, with temperatures colder than Pluto’s 43 K, so they’ll be good practice for missions to the Outer Solar System. Mining such frozen masses will require some interesting technology – I’m hoping we’ll study such ice before we try to utilize it, since it’ll be a chronological record of water vapour on the Moon. Potentially. We don’t really know much about how it’s distributed yet. If it has been adsorbed into the regolith then there’ll be next to no trace of its history. If it has formed layered deposits then that’ll be a great boon for science and a good reason not to go crazy with the stuff.
Water discovery fuels hope to colonize moon
Launching from the Moon via using the indigenous water will probably mean most of the reaction mass – water – will return to the Moon as a temporary atmosphere that we now know will stick to the regolith until it’s probably returned to the ice-traps at the poles… if we don’t get in its way and dig up the poles too much. The frigid shadows of the Moon are, oddly enough, a resource that will serve us well if we respect it. That’s a lesson that Space makes easy for us to learn, because failure to do so is usually lethal.