Water, water everywhere ...

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... and hopefully plenty for us to drink, once we get there.

There's water all over the moon, after all.

"Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the moon," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the studies detailing the findings.

While the findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, don't mean there are pools of liquid water sitting on the moon, it does mean that there is — entirely unexpectedly — water potentially tied up or mixed in the minerals that make up the lunar dirt.

"What we're detecting is completely unexpected," Pieters said. "The moon continues to surprise us."

And Mars hides water ice just beneath -- really, just beneath -- the surface of the planet.

Craters gouged into the ruddy Martian terrain have revealed subsurface water ice closer to the red planet's equator than would be expected, new orbiter images show.

The ice also seems to be 99 percent pure, instead of the dirty dust and ice mixture some scientists expected to see, scientists said today [September 24, 2009].

I'm optimistic about space travel. I am confident that we will eventually colonize other planets, and not soon enough for me. So it's encouraging to know that we can possibly get something to drink, once we get where we're going.
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