Yesterday space.com published an article which said, that water on the Moon is officially found. If you imagining rivers and oceans, it’s not like that :) Moon is dryer than any desert on Earth, but still scientists estimate about 32 ounces (900 g) of water per ton of Moon’s regolith.
There is a good possibility to find water in the craters which never see direct sunlight. Image from: wikinfo.org
How was water discovered? Well, there is still no direct evidence of it, but three different spacecrafts (India’s Chandrayaan-1, Cassini and Deep Impact spacecraft) detected that there is something with hydrogen+oxygen in there and they assumed that it’s water. That’s why I personally is not that much exited about that announcement. Still nothing can beat the direct water detection expected from LCROSS mission.
LCROSS spacecraft will drop a rocket stage to the Moon to see if water will fly out of the impact. After that it's going to crush itself there to sacrifice itself for the sake of science. Image credit: NASA
What does water give us? First of all if people would ever live there on a permanent basis, they will drink this water. Second, you can use water as a fuel (sounds fantastic, right?). It is possible to break water to hydrogen and oxygen using electricity (from solar panels for example). Later you can burn hydrogen and oxygen and use energy from burning to do some useful work (drive a lunar car for example). When you burn hydrogen and oxygen you get pure water, which you can split again later with electricity, etc… Pretty cool stuff and very eco-friendly as well ;)
Artist's conception for the Moon base. I don't know if I will live long enough to witness it. Image from: daviddarling.info
Where did water come from? There are two main hypothesis for that. One says that comets crushing into surface brought all the water (those comets which brought water to Earth, those comets which spread the life all over the Universe, blah-blah :), second hypothesis suggests that Solar wind (protons and hydrogen atoms) collide with Moon’s surface (which is 45% oxygen) form a bit of water. Water presence on the Moon means a lot of good stuff for us if we ever are going to make a permanent lunar base — we can drink it, we can breath oxygen from it, we can burn it.
