[floatingslowly]

^^^ because without space exploration, there may come a day (VERY SOON) when there is no earth or humanity to even worry about such things.

JUMP 'N SPREEAAAD OUT.

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Tentative Signs of Water Found on Moon

 

New data and images from NASA's new moon orbiter — the first in more than a decade — have revealed tentative signs of lunar water ice, the space agency announced Thursday.

The powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has successfully completed its testing and calibration phase and entered its mapping orbit of the moon. The spacecraft's instruments have also made measurements of space radiation in the lunar environment and have found more widespread possible signatures of water on the moon.

"The LRO mission already has begun to give us new data that will lead to a vastly improved atlas of the lunar south pole and advance our capability for human exploration and scientific benefit," said Richard Vondrak, LRO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The first results from LRO's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector, or LEND, indicate that permanently shadowed and nearby regions may harbor water ice and hydrogen. LEND relies on a decrease in neutron radiation from the lunar surface to indicate the presence of water or hydrogen.

One big finding so far from LEND is that "the hydrogen is not confined to permanently shadowed craters," Vondrak said. Team members want more observations to confirm these findings and determine how significant they are and how to interpret them.

"The power of LRO is that we're not just sending one instrument, like LEND, to look for hydrogen, we're characterizing fully" the lunar south pole, Vondrak said.