There's Tons of Water on the Moon

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NASA announced earlier this week that it's Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters on the moon that contain 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 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice on the moon.

According to Popular Science, " the implications of vast deposits of surface water ice on the moon are vast. NASA scientists have said in the past that if plentiful ice deposits exist on the moon, they could be melted down for drinking water, separated into oxygen and hydrogen to provide rocket fuel and drinking water, and perhaps even be used to help power a moon base's fuel cells."

Which means this is a pretty cool discovery. Of course, the U.S. uses approxiamtely 21,000,000 gallons (179 million pounds) of water per day. At that rate the water on the moon would be consumed in a little over 7 days, but it's interesting to think about drinking "moon water" or powering the space shuttle with "lunar hydro power" one day.

03/04/2010 : Permalink