Scientists Certain Moon Holds Water Enough Found To Support Colony, Nasa Believes

Enough water is frozen in the loose soil of the moon to support a lunar base and perhaps to one day build a human colony there, NASA scientists said Thursday.

“We are certain there is water there,” said Alan Binder, a lead scientist for the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which made the discovery. “We think we are seeing between 10 million and 100 million tons of water.”

Although the water is frozen and mixed with shaded soil deep in scattered craters near the north and south lunar poles, Binder said that it would be easy to convert to liquid water that could be used to make rocket propellant and breathing oxygen.

Preliminary estimates indicate that the moon holds enough water, in widely separated deposits, to fill a lake 2 miles square and 35 feet deep, Binder said.

The discovery of water, he said, means that it would be easier to establish a base where people could live for extended periods and to use extraterrestrial resources - moon water converted to rocket fuel - to explore deeper into the solar system.

“For the first time, we may be able to go to another space body and fuel up,” said Binder.

The Lunar Prospector, a $65 million robot craft, was launched in January and has spent the last seven weeks orbiting the moon and taking readings of the surface with radar and other instruments.

Water was discovered by an instrument that measures the speed at which neutrons, a type of subatomic particle, bounce off materials on and near the lunar surface. The neutrons come from natural cosmic rays that constantly bathe the moon and are slowed when they strike atoms of hydrogen, the chemical that combines with oxygen to make water.

William Feldman, an Energy Department scientist who analyzed the neutron data, said conclusions about water are based on a month’s worth of data and should be called “preliminary.”

But he said it is quite clear there are dense deposits of hydrogen atoms at the lunar poles. From this, he believes “the evidence of water ice is quite strong.”