The Moon's Secret

By David

For a long time, scientists thought the moon was completely dry. No life, no water, no oxygen. One huge problem with humans going off the planet Earth is our need to have water and oxygen to survive. Water is really heavy and difficult to bring on a space journey from Earth. That is why it is important to find water any place we are planning to go.

NASA plans to send people to the moon to stay for longer periods of time and eventually build a colony. To do that, they needed to know if there was enough water on the moon to support human life.

Artist's rendering, LCROSS spacecraft separates from Centaur stage. Credit: NASA

LCROSS stands for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. It was first launched on June 18th, 2009 onboard the Atlas V. The main purpose of LCROSS was to see if there was water in craters on the moon. The moon has quite a lot of water on it, but it is all encased in ice. It might be possible to harvest the ice and convert it to water for people to use. That means the moon could potentially house a colony because of the information discovered in this mission.

The visible camera image showing the ejecta plume at about 20 seconds after impact. Credits: NASA