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First the spent rocket impacted into the Moon, sending up a cloud of dust into the atmosphere. The LCROSS then flew through the dust plume and analyzed it from the inside out as the LRO watched from 30 miles away. Recent papers, published last month revealed that the mission was scientifically more spectacular than anyone could have hoped.

While previous missions such as the Apollo flights had visited the Moon in the past few decades it turns out they were not traveling to its most exciting part. While these missions headed for the sterile, desert-like midlands, it is the craters such as Cabeus in the polar-regions that hold the true wonders, preserved at temperatures of minus 390 degrees F.

The biggest surprise was water and lots of it. The crater in question actually holds 1 billion gallons of water in its soil, in addition to a host of elements including carbon monoxide and dioxide, ammonia, sodium, mercury, silver, sulfur and methane. Water is probably the most exciting though, because with this a sustainable lunar base could be set up, without have the worry of transferring expensive Earth water to the Moon. Also water’s components, oxygen and hydrogen, would be crucial for survival - oxygen for obvious reasons, while hydrogen could provide rocket fuel.

However, while this discovery will no doubt inspire many a movie and science fiction novel due to the possibilities of using this water to colonize the Moon, reality may be a tad further off. The primarily set back will be the Obama administration’s decision to cancel NASA’s plans for a manned return to the moon in the next decade, opting instead for plans that include a manned landing on a near-Earth asteroid and an eventual mission to Mars.

Maybe Obama and his government should reconsider. After all if they don’t somebody else will - India says it will attempt a Moon landing in 2020 and China says it will do the same in 2025. Either way somebody will be making use of the Moon’s water.

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