Ice Deposits Found at North Pole of Moon

March 3rd, 2010

Always surprises me when there is news such as this. We have been studying the moon for centuries, and we have even found ice deposits on moons for OTHER PLANETS, but we just find ice on OUR moon now?

OK…obviously the moon isn’t the easiest thing to study being in space and all, but it is just surprising that we still find such things there when we have actually landed on it. Yes we did conspiracy whackos.

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice.

“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”

Get your nordic track promotion code out, it is time to go moon skiing .