The Moon suffers from a PR problem. Mars is the media darling of the family, with rovers crawling around its surface and screenwriters fantasizing about its potential to harbor life. The Moon is considered boring: lifeless, dusty, monochromatic, and soooo 1970s.

Not so fast – there might be something to this Moon thing after all. Recent analysis has found water hiding within dust grains from the Moon. To be fair, several orbiting probes have detected water in shaded craters near the Moon’s south pole, but the bulk lunar material was assumed to be bone dry.

But now, researchers at Brown have detected actual water molecules from lunar samples for the first time – 46 parts per million, to be precise. They calculate that the magma that flowed onto the Moon’s surface billions of years ago had up to 750 parts per million, roughly equivalent to magma on the early Earth. Scientifically, this finding has pretty big implications about the formation mechanism of the moon, but it’s also interesting to consider the use of water as a resource. Nobody knows just how much is up there, of course, but it could potentially fuel future human colonies and significantly lower the costs of lunar exploration and habitation.

The marketing team behind space exploration has done a nice job of connecting Mars with the possibility of past life, and I bet we’ll begin to see them link the Moon to the possibility of future life (as in, human colonists) in the near future.

A topographic map of the Aitken basin near the Moon’s South pole – one of the places believed to contain the most water.

Side note: I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of a stickler for grammar, and one of my biggest pet peeves is the way British newspapers deal with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They generally use “Nasa,” like “nasal” without the l…and capitalized for some reason. At the very least it should be NASA, and to be particularly anal, it should be N.A.S.A., because that’s how acronyms work – each letter represents an abbreviated word; otherwise, we’re just screaming “Nasa” in all-caps.

Ok, end of rant. Off to India tomorrow, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for a daily dose of space science for the next dozen days!