This is the Guardian. Water, we can't get very far without it.

That's why if humans are to venture further into space,

we're going to need to source it off planet.

And the first stop, our nearest neighbor, of course.

When we first set foot on the moon, we thought it was a dry and barren place.

But a recent discovery by researchers suggested in fact water could be all over the lunar surface

hiding in plain sight.

So where is all this water?

How could we extract it? What does it mean for the future of space exploration?

I'm the Guardian Science Editor Ian's sample and this is Science Weekly.

Mahesh Annand, you're a professor of planetary science and exploration at the Open University, and you've recently published a study

about potentially finding billions of tons of water locked up on the Moon.

Before we get to that, it'd be good to understand a bit more about the sort of history of water on the moon.

When did we first find evidence or hints that there was water up there?

The evidence or the hints, if you want to call it of

water on the moon has been there for quite some time even before the Apollo days

when telescopic observations have been used to suggest that there might be water ice present in the permanently shaded craters near the lunar poles, but of course there was no direct test for those.

And fast forward Apollo era, we sent humans to the moon, they collected samples, the samples

will return to the Earth, they were analyzed, and of course the first

thing people wanted to know is that was there any water in those lunar samples?

The consensus emerged, given whatever technology they had at that time, but actually there wasn't any water.

So the moon basically was an anhydrous body, but it's still the possibility of water-ice in the polar

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