NASA's View of the Moon's North Pole
It turns out the LCROSS spacecraft's discovery of water ice at the Moon's south pole wasn't the whole story.

Scientists now have detected massive amounts of ice deposits near the Moon's north pole as well, using data from a NASA radar aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft--and this time, it's much more ice.

NASA said in a statement that the Mini-SAR instrument, which is a lightweight, synthetic "aperture radar," discovered over 40 craters filled with water ice between one and 9 miles in diameter.

The agency estimates that there could be 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice in those craters. Along with other recent water ice discoveries on the Moon, the latest one has implications for future manned Moon missions (assuming they ever happen again), or even extended Moon colonizations.

Originally posted to Gearlog.