NASA's Shot At Moon Splashes Up Lots Of Water
LOS ANGELES (AP) — It turns out NASA made quite a splash, when it blasted a hole in the moon.
New results from last year's moonshot reveal that there was a lot of water, relatively speaking, in a crater that never sees the light of the sun.
The impact kicked up 41 gallons of ice and vapor, to be exact.
It may not sound like much -- in fact, it's about what a typical washing machine uses for a load. But it's almost twice as much as researchers had initially measured, and more than they ever expected to find.
A NASA scientist now calculates that there could be a billion gallons of water in the crater that was hit. That's enough to fill 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Proof that the moon has large quantities of water bring hopes for a possible future astronaut outpost where water on site could be used for drinking or making rocket fuel.
But the scientists' excitement is tempered by the political reality that there's no plan to land on the moon anytime soon.
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