Of course, that would make Moon bases a more plausible idea:
A pair of papers published by the journal Nature detail the discovery, which was made using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).
Using SOFIA, the team identified liquid water’s unique fingerprint near the southern pole of the Moon. It’s not there as “puddles of water,” as Casey Honniball, postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of one of the studies, described during a live stream, but spread out molecules of H2O.
It’s also not an awful lot of water: about 12 liquid ounces in a cubic meter of soil. It might also be quite tricky to extract as it’s completely mixed in with the soil.
The scientists suggest the water could have come through either the solar winds, or from impacting micrometeorites that may have contained water on their own.
The second paper found that the Moon is dotted with “billions” of tiny craters, creating shadowed regions all over its surface. The researchers concluded that these regions are technically cold enough to hold frozen ice.
Victor Tangermann, “NASA’s Big Moon Surprise Is That Lunar Soil Contains Water” at Futurism
Both this paper and this one are open access.
Like we said earlier, time to dust off the ID idea that Earth is fine-tuned for space discovery.