Why is finding water on the Moon significant?
The discovery of water ice on the Moon would be a vital step toward the building of a human outpost on the Moon. According to NASA’s February 1996 Strategic Plan, goals of NASA’s Human Exploration and Development of Space Enterprise (HEDS) include the following: “Explore and settle the Solar System. Achieve routine space travel. Enrich life on Earth through people living and working in space.” In the Strategic Plan, HEDS indicates the necessity for missions that will “demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing local resources to ‘live off the land,'” in order to meet its goals. Water is an extremely expensive material to transport to the Moon. If Lunar Prospector discovers water ice on the Moon, a very important local resource will be available to astronauts because we use water to drink, to bathe and to fuel spacecraft (after splitting water molecules into their individual elemental components, hydrogen and oxygen).
