NASA confirms more water present on the moon than previously thought

At Monday's press conference, NASA’s Astrophysics Division Director Paul Herz made a surprising announcement.

“For the first time, water has been confirmed to be present on the sunlit surface of the moon.”

However, water is more common on the moon than previously thought.

Although this is the first time scientists have identified water on the moon's sunlit surface, and reports from 2009 and 2018 confirm water's presence on the moon, two new studies talk about the possibility of the moon harboring more water and ice than previously thought.

“If you can imagine standing on the surface of the moon near one of it’s poles, you would see shadows all over the place,” Paul Hayne, Professor at the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement. “Many of those tiny shadows could be full of ice.