Bombing the Moon: Update

You may remember that last month, NASA bombed the moon. The purpose was to see if water and ice would kick up amid all the debris, and the tests just came back:

It's official: the moon is pregnant. Just kidding--its water just broke. Via the NYT Science section:

“Indeed yes, we found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference. “And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount.”

The confirmation of scientists’ suspicions is welcome news to explorers who might set up home on the lunar surface and to scientists who hope that the water, in the form of ice accumulated over billions of years, holds a record of the solar system’s history.

So, why is this important? Well, in terms of the long term viability of our species, water might be the first natural resource to go. If humans have a future on Earth (or elsewhere), the difference between trace amounts of lunar water and large deposits (apparently among the LCROSS findings) is roughly equal to the difference between a species that fizzles in the next few millennia and one that lasts much, much longer.