Yahoo! News - Findings Dampen Hope of Water on Dark Side of Moon: "Findings Dampen Hope of Water on Dark Side of Moon
Wed Nov 12, 1:44 PM ETAdd Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!


LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists dampened hopes of finding large amounts of water on the dark side of the Moon on Wednesday with new evidence showing that if any deposits existed, they are in short supply.


Data from the Clementine and Lunar Prospector space missions in the 1990s had suggested there could be significant supplies of water, vital to support life and human colonies on the Moon, stashed in the craters near the poles.
But after conducting a radar survey of craters constantly in shadow at the lunar poles, Bruce Campbell of the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) in Washington DC and his colleagues said they did not uncover any evidence of thick ice deposits.
'Any lunar ice present within the regions visible to the Arecibo radar must therefore be in the form of distributed grain or thin layers,' Campbell said in a report in the science journal Nature.
The wavelengths from the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that can penetrate deep into the craters did not produce strong echoes which would have indicated large chunks of ice.
Weaker echoes suggest any water that is there would probably be embedded in rock.
If there is water, it would probably have been deposited when comets, which are comprised largely of ice, collided with the moon over billions of years.
Scientist believe most of the water would have evaporated into space but some may have collected in the shado"