Water, water, everywhere...?

We believe that water is one of the key ingredients for life, and this is often discussed in schools, and so it have been interesting to hear the reports of water on the Moon and Mars over the last few days.

Last week, the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter discovered that areas of the lunar surface are slightly damp... slightly meaning that the Moon is still dryer than the driest of Earth's deserts! But there is water present. Full details of that can be found on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

Orbiting Mars, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered 100 fresh meteor impact craters. On Earth, most meteors burn up in our atmosphere, and do not reach the ground. But the atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than ours, allowing far more meteors to hit the surface. And when a crater is formed, you can see what is just beneath the martian surface... and it appears to be ice. More details of this story at the NASA-Science website, and on the BBC News.

This also implies that had the robotic arm on NASA's Viking 2 (which landed on Mars back in 1976) been just 10 cm longer, it might have struck ice!