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...would suggest, it would undoubtedly be a keeper; however, it turns out it belonged to her second husband's second wife, and the university has no idea under what circumstances it was donated. Or what about a giant rhinoceros skull? Is that worth keeping? How about the samples of earth dug up from the English Channel, pre-Chunnel? Hundreds of beautiful hand-drawn lecture slides made by the scientist Sir Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the diode? Or the slides of microscopic fossils, which don't seem to take up much space until you consider there's a quarter million...
...time, viewers from Earth were disappointed. They had been told - incorrectly, as it turned out - that they would be able see the impact through large amateur telescopes. Reporters were frustrated because, despite the drama, no actual information was available right away. It took a month of what Colaprete calls 28-hour days to extract the major news that there is, in fact, water on the moon...
...discovery was worth the wait. Analysis of the water ice may give scientists an eons-long look at environmental history: any ice lurking in the shadows of lunar craters would have been there for a long, long time - billions of years, even. On Earth, for example, scientists get their best information about the planet's climatic history from ancient air trapped in polar ice, says Greg Delory of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Similarly, the lunar poles are record keepers of conditions over long periods. They are the dusty attic of the solar system, says...
...solar system; that ice would hold a record of the cosmic chemistry of those formative times. But the ice could have also been formed by particles streaming from the sun, which gradually combined with lunar minerals to form water, then ice. Or it might have come from Earth, perhaps in the gigantic collision that created the moon in the first place. Whatever its origins, says Delory, the prospect of studying it is really exciting...
...addition to its historical significance, water on the moon holds prospects for the future. If humans are ever going to establish a long-term presence on the moon, they will need water to drink, and tapping a local supply would be a lot more convenient than lugging it from Earth. Beyond that, water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen - the former makes pretty good rocket fuel, and the latter is useful for breathing...