GREAT INDIAN DISCOVERY NEXT TO ZERO: WATER IN THE MOON

Three major studies and a new NASA expedition are all pointing to a strong chance that the moon has surface water, a finding that could make a "tremendous difference" to further space exploration.

Nearly 40 years after scientists examined rocks and dismissed the moon as a dry body, the studies of Indian satellite CHANDRAYAAN data are saying otherwise.

Moon water would be a "huge" boost to space exploration, experts said 

The frozen water is believed to exist in deep craters near the moon's poles, which are in permanent shadow that protects the water from evaporation.

Next month, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission will take the hunt for water a step further.

It will use the same method as its Deep Impact probe, which smashed a projectile into comet Tempel 1 in July 2005, and analyzed the innards of a comet for the first time.

It's not enough moisture to foster homegrown life on the moon. But if processed in mass quantities, it might provide resources — drinking water and rocket fuel — for future moon-dwellers, scientists say. The water comes and goes during the lunar day.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

"It's sort of just sticking on the surface," Sunshine said. "We always think of the moon as dead and this is sort of a dynamic process that's going on."

 Hydroxyl is one atom of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, instead of two hydrogen atoms in water.

Because of the timing during the daylight when some of that wavelength disappears and some doesn't, it shows that both hydroxyl and water are present, Sunshine said.

Where did that water come from?

Pieters[ SCIENTIST] figures there are three possibilities: It came from comets or asteroids that crashed into the moon, those crashes freed up trapped water from below the surface, or the solar wind carries hydrogen atoms that binds with oxygen in the dirt. That final possibility is the one that Sunshine and Pieters both prefer.

If it is the solar wind, that also means that other places without atmosphere in our solar system, such as Mercury or asteroids, can also have bits of water, Sunshine said.