Now it’s the turn of NASA (independent agency of the United States government responsible for aviation and spaceflight) and it has corroborated the findings of India’s maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan, the presence of water on the moon. What is more, it has stated based on impacts made by a new satellite that there is, indeed, plenty of it.

Speaking on this, Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for US space agency NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference, “Indeed yes, we found water.” Well, the satellite is known as Lcross and it did slam into a crater near the Moon’s South Pole a month ago. It has also come to the knowledge that the collision created through a painstaking effort a hole 60 to 100-feet wide and kicked up at least 24 gallons of water.

“We got more than just whiff,” said Peter H Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator of the mission. “We practically tasted it with the impact.”

It is worthwhile to mention, in this context, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) had made the annunciation of the discovery of water on the moon by India’s Chandrayaan-1 on September 24 only after data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument indicated the presence of water molecules on the lunar surface. M3 was one of the 11 scientific instruments onboard Chandrayaan that ISRO launched October 22, 2008. However the moon mission had to be aborted on August 30 after Chandrayaan lost radio contact with the earth.

The new US Lcross mission did comprise two pieces - an empty rocket stage to carve into the lunar surface and a small spacecraft to measure what was kicked up, but it too slammed into the surface.

“We’re unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor and, by extension, the solar system,” said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The moon harbors many secrets, and LCROSS has added a new layer to our understanding.”

“We are ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.