NASA AND ISRO  MAJOR BREAK THROUGH

The first object in the night sky most of us ever saw, Haunted by poets, looked upon by youngsters in love, studied intensely by astronomers for four centuries, examined by geologists for the last 50 years, walked upon by twelve humans, this is Earth's satellite.

Are you ready to take a shower on moon .Before you pack your bag lets  get in to discovery

A little about moon

The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 kilometres (238,857 mi), about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. So you have to cover that distance to take shower .Be ready with a rocket.

The Moon's diameter is 3,474 kilometres (2,159 mi), a little more than a quarter of that of the Earth. Thus, the Moon's surface area is less than a tenth that of the Earth (about a quarter the Earth's land area, approximately as large as Russia, Canada, and the United States combined), and its volume is about 2 percent that of Earth. The pull of gravity at its surface is about 17 percent of that at the Earth's surface.

Why should there be water on the Moon?

Simply for the same reason that there's water on Earth. A favorite theory is that water, either as water by itself or as its components of hydrogen and oxygen, was deposited on Earth during its early history--mostly during a period of "late heavy bombardment" 3.9 billion years ago--by the impacts of comets and asteroids. Because the Moon shares the same area of space as Earth, it should have received its share of water as well. However, since it has only a tiny fraction of Earth's gravity, most of the Moon's water supply should have evaporated and drifted off into space long ago. Most, but perhaps not all.

In ancient times, observers commonly thought the Moon had abundant water--in fact, the great lava plains like Mare Imbrium were called maria, or seas. But when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in 1969, they stepped out not into the water of the Sea of Tranquillity, but onto basaltic rock. No one was surprised by that--the idea of lunar maria had been replaced by lava plains decades earlier.

Earlier  discovered facts 

There have been raging debates over the years as to whether there is frozen water on the moon or not

When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back several samples of lunar rocks.

The moon rocks were analyzed for signs of water bound to minerals present in the rocks; while trace amounts of water were detected, these were assumed to be contamination from Earth, because the containers the rocks came back in had leaked.

"The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth," said Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is a member of one of the NASA-built instrument teams for India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite and has studied the moon since the Apollo missions.

While scientists continued to suspect that water ice deposits could be found in the coldest spots of south pole craters that never saw sunlight, the consensus became that the rest of the moon was bone dry.

A ray of hope was always there for finding water on moon

Controversial evidence for whether there is water on the moon began appearing in 1996 with the Clementine probe, a joint Pentagon-NASA project. Radar scans of the lunar surface reflected back the kind of signals at the south pole that one might expect of ice and other frozen compounds.

However, later studies using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico revealed similar reflections "even from areas exposed to sunlight, places too warm for water ice to survive," Colaprete said. This suggested the reflections that Clementine saw might have come not from water but from piles of rocks.

But in 1998, NASA's Lunar Prospector also detected hints of water, this time at both poles. Its instruments analyzed neutrons absorbed by a variety of elements on the moon's surface, including hydrogen. With this device, Lunar Prospector discovered hydrogen concentrated at the moon's poles, which scientists conjectured might have come from water molecules, each of which contains two hydrogen atoms. Researchers speculated the moon's poles could hold as much as 3 billion metric tons of ice.

The problem was  that Lunar Prospector could only measure hydrogen, and not what matter the hydrogen was in. Instead of ice, the hydrogen might come from water bound up in clays, or protons from the solar wind, or the kind of carbon-laden molecules from comets that might have been part of the organic soup that life developed from on Earth, "or a mix of all those things.

Major Breakthrough

India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, found the strongest evidence yet that the moon isn’t the dry place it was thought to be, a finding that has been validated by a US space probe and which itself supported data that’s a decade old. The moon mineralogy mapper (M3), an instrument provided by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and fitted on board Chandrayaan-1, made the discovery. Scientists validated the finding when Deep Impact probe, another Nasa spacecraft, flew by the moon in June. India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite, NASA's Cassini spacecraft and NASA's Deep Impact probe call into question 40 years of assumptions on the make-up of the lunar surface.

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Chandrayaan-1 was India's first unmanned lunar probe. It was launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation in October 2008, and operated until August 2009. The spacecraft carried five Indian instruments and six from abroad, including M3 and another from NASA, three from the European Space Agency (ESA), and one from Bulgaria.

All three spacecraft detected the spectral signature of water (the wavelengths of light that it reflects) across the lunar surface. The signal, or fingerprint of water, was strongest at the lunar poles and varied in strength depending on the time of day, with the most robust signals coming early in the morning and the lowest at midday.

The signal actually indicates the presence of both water molecules and hydroxyl — an oxygen molecule and hydrogen molecule bonded together, or essentially water missing one of its hydrogens. Hydroxyl is more reactive than water. What minerals bear the hydroxyl isn't clear, though examples of hydroxyl-bearing minerals on Earth are the various clays.

How much of each type of molecule exist on the surface can't be determined from the data.

The exact form that the water takes on the lunar surface isn't clear with the data the scientists have, either, though they have several ideas: The water could be mixed in to the lunar surface or could be a part of altered minerals present in the lunar dirt.

It also remains a mystery how the water and hydroxyl formed, though some of the scientists who made the discovery suggest it could be from the interaction of the solar wind with the lunar surface.

While the quantity is not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil, according to Carle Pieters, principal investigator of the M3 instrument and the author of one of the papers.

Harvesting one tonne of the top layer of the moon’s surface would yield as much as 32 ounces, or about a cup of water, according to scientists involved in the discovery.

“When we say ‘water on the moon’, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” Pieters said in a statement. “Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimetres of the moon’s surface.

 The finding is a boost for India’s ambitions for deep space exploration. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will follow up by landing a rover on the moon by 2013 and send probes to asteroids and Mars in the future amid a renewed burst of global interest in exploring outer space.

Although there’s little evidence to suggest that life existed on the moon ever, water on its surface in any form is necessary to set up a base—both to exploit the moon’s resources such as helium-3, a clean nuclear fuel, and setting up a transit point for possible exploration of planets beyond, such as Mars.Ice that on heating vapourizes without the intermediary liquid state is called water-ice. Such ice naturally occurs in certain planets and their satellites.

The discovery of water on the moon comes at a critical time for Nasa as the White House is deliberating its direction over the next 20 years. Among the proposals in a major review is a permanent moon base, from which astronauts would explore the terrain and gain expertise required for an eventual mission to Mars.

The review says: "By first exploring the moon, we could develop the operational skills and technology for landing on, launching from and working on a planetary surface. In the process, we could acquire an understanding of human adaptation to another world that would one day allow us to go to Mars. Over many missions, a small colony of habitats would be assembled, and explorers would begin to live there for many months, conducting scientific studies and prospecting for resources that could be used as fuel."

Significantly, the latest studies suggest a new theory to explain how water-ice could have formed on the moon. Hydrogen, an essential component of water, comes from solar wind that reacts with the oxygen. Over time, these drops of water gradually move towards the poles and form chunks of water-ice, said Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland, and one of the authors of the papers published in Scienc

Still, the most powerful evidence of water on the moon is likely to come from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the moon’s south pole on 9 October to sense the presence of water in the resulting debris, Lawrence Taylor of the University of Tennessee and one of the authors of three papers to be published in Science magazine on Friday, said in an email.

While the formation of an earth-like, liquid reservoir on the moon is impossible because of the weak atmosphere on Earth’s only natural satellite, there are chances of fresh and bigger chunks of water-ice forming over several years on the lunar surface.

Where the water comes from

Combined, the findings show that not only is the moon hydrated, the process that makes it so is a dynamic one that is driven by the daily changes in solar radiation hitting any given spot on the surface.

The sun might also have something to do with how the water got there.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: that brought from outside sources, such as water-bearing comets striking the surface, or that that originates on the moon.

This second, endogenic, source is thought to possibly come from the interaction of the solar wind with moon rocks and soils.

The rocks and regolith that make up the lunar surface are about 45 percent oxygen (combined with other elements as mostly silicate minerals). The solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles emitted by the sun — are mostly protons, or positively charged hydrogen atoms.

If the charged hydrogens, which are traveling at one-third the speed of light, hit the lunar surface with enough force, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, Taylor, the M3 team member suspects. Where free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there is a high chance that trace amounts of water will form.

The various study researchers also suggest that the daily dehydration and rehydration of the trace water across the surface could lead to the migration of hydroxyl and hydrogen towards the poles where it can accumulate in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.