More news about lunar "water"

mca

Footnote: 1Several days ago, NASA announced that the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, an instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the Moon. NASA's Cassini spacecraft and NASA's Epoxi spacecraft confirmed the find. Ethridge says: "The data [from the three aforementioned spacecraft] dealt with water detected from the top 1 or 2 mm of soil from regions like the Apollo sites, which are known to be "depleted" of any water (i.e., water produced from solar wind protons). But their data also shows much higher signals for water from the polar regions. The best locations for water ice are permanently shadowed craters near the poles. The water at the poles may be underneath a 1 cm depleted layer that overlies a higher concentration of water down to a meter deep. A few years ago, Lunar Prospector and Clementine produced data for hydrogen that translates to average concentrations estimated to be from 1 to 4.6 % water over large areas at the poles. Assuming an average 2 percent concentration, that translates to maybe 40 pounds -- about 5 gallons -- of water in a cubic meter of moon soil. (2 percent of a 1 ton is 40 pounds. A cubic meter of lunar soil is approximately 1 ton.)"

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/07oct_microwave.htm