"Moon Crater Has More Water Than Parts of Earth"

More good news from the water-in-space department:

A frigid crater at the moon's south pole is jam-packed with water ice, with some spots wetter than Earth's Sahara desert, boosting hopes for future lunar bases.

That's the picture painted by six new studies that analyzed the intentional moon crash of a NASA spacecraft on Oct. 9, 2009. The agency's LCROSS probe was looking for signs of water when it smashed into Cabeus crater at the moon's south pole last year, and the spacecraft found plenty of it, as scientists announced last year.

...

Water ice makes up about 5.6 percent of the total mass on the floor of Cabeus — making the crater about twice as wet as Sahara Desert soil, according to LCROSS mission principal investigator Tony Colaprete.

"That is a surprise," said Colaprete, who works at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "And it has a lot of ramifications in terms of our understanding of water and other volatiles on the moon."

(from Mike Wall on Space.com)

It wasn't a showy crash, but that impact last year is resulting in some good science. Well done.