LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said yesterday — 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 from 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 white-gallon water buckets 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.
Even so, members of a 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. “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.
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 yesterday — 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 at Berkeley.