Scientists Find Direct Evidence of Ice On the Moon (qz.com)

According to a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists have found the first direct evidence of frozen water on the Moon's poles. "The discovery is based on data gathered by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a NASA instrument that flew to the Moon back in 2008," reports Quartz. From the report: Reanalyzing this data today, the researchers found tiny patches of ice mixed with rock on the surface of certain craters at the northernmost and southernmost points on the Moon. Shuai Li, a geologist at the University of Hawaii who worked on the study, says the data can't tell us where the ice originally came from. However, Li adds, it's likely that it came from comets that smashed into the Moon years ago. Collisions with other space objects, like meteorites and comets, gave the Moon its pockmarked surface, and could have easily brought a foreign substance like ice along with them. Ice on the lunar surface could also be a result of gases coming out of the rock below. It could also be due to solar winds -- energetically charged ions emanating from the sun -- bombarding the Moon's surface to cause the chemical reactions needed to make frozen water. However, to truly understand the ice's origins, Li hopes to get a rover onto the Moon to take actual samples of the frigid lunar ground and its ice.

Comments

Because Mars is sort of livable, more interesting.

[SuperKendall]

You could actually walk outside on Mars with just an oxygen bottle and very light suit - at times a high of 68F on the equator at noon.

The air is super thin but still better than nothing; the water that is there more plentiful, the gravity far more than the moon where you would atrophy to a far greater degree than on Mars (Mars is 38% of Earth gravity, the Moon is just 17% or more than half of Mars gravity).

We'll see manned bases on Mars long before the Moon... if we ever see manned Moon bases.