Moon's Water Finding Applauded Internationally

Today's announcement that NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater is being saluted around the world.

"Congratulations to the LCROSS project and science team for the detection of water," said Bernard Foing, Executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).

ILEWG is a public forum sponsored by the world's space agencies to support international cooperation towards a world strategy for the exploration and utilization of the Moon - our natural satellite.

Foing noted that the spectral match and rigorous analysis and quantification are impressive, he said, and noted that it will be exciting to compare LCROSS measurements to cometary compounds.

Doing so will help further understand the delivery mechanisms involved of water being ensconced on the Moon.

"This is a great inspiration for the next lunar missions, opening the perspective for upcoming landers, as promoted by the community and ILEWG," Foing said. "Let us follow-on LCROSS and study the questions raised by these beautiful first results."
Given future samples from the Moon, Foing said "we can hope to study the record in the last billions of years of the delivery of water and organics to the Earth-Moon system!"

Today's "water shed" moment in lunar exploration was underscored by Greg Delory, senior fellow, Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley: "It's not Apollo's moon...it's our moon."

The LCROSS spacecraft and a companion rocket stage made twin impacts in the Cabeus crater on October 9th that created a plume of material from the bottom of a crater that has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

LCROSS was built by Northrop Grumman Corporation for NASA's Ames Research Center.

For information about LCROSS, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

By Leonard David