Pete Domenici: “last Friday, the front page of the Washington Post discussed solid new evidence for water at the poles of the Moon. That…”

“last Friday, the front page of the Washington Post discussed solid new evidence for water at the poles of the Moon. That news may have great implications for future lunar colonies. With costs around $10,000 per pound just to put material in orbit around the earth, this discovery could tremendously reduce costs for future manned lunar bases. Future lunar camps may be able to extract their water supplies, rather than hauling water with them. The whole NASA team deserves many compliments for their efforts leading up to this exciting news. I want to commend to your attention the role that New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, in partnership with the Southwest Research Institute, played in this momentous announcement. Los Alamos designed the neutron spectrometer aboard the Lunar Prospector that enabled these exciting measurements. The neutrons studied by the instrument come from natural cosmic rays that constantly bathe the moon. The neutrons are then slowed by interactions with hydrogen in water. The spectrometer detects the energy of neutrons leaving the lunar surface. The complexity of designing instrumentation and actually obtaining the data for a mission like this is immense.”