Actually yes. But not the way we feel here on Earth. On the Moon, there is water all over the surface, but mostly in the form of ice rather than pools of liquid water. Some places have more water than others. There are areas at the poles of the Moon that receive no sunlight, so they are extremely cold. We call these areas of permanent shade, and they can have a lot of ice in them. The ice in these areas may be mixed with the lunar soil buried deep under the surface, or there may be a layer of ice.

Outside of these extremely cold places, there is much less water, but it’s still there. The sunlit surfaces of the Moon experience extreme temperature fluctuations of up to 300 degrees Celsius. This makes it difficult for water to survive on the sunlit moon, but the surviving water is unlike any water we have on Earth.

But what does this mean? Imagine you have a handful of sand and you spread the grains so far that no grain of sand touches the other. A single grain of sand is a molecule of water. This is what we observe on the sunlit surface of the Moon. However, a sunny month contains 100 times less water than the Sahara Desert, but there may be tons of ice at the poles of the moon.

So, is there water on the moon? For this reason. And one day, future astronauts will be able to collect this water and use it as drinking water, breathing oxygen, or rocket fuel to propel us further into our solar system. Collecting this water is a critical component of future human exploration of deep space, so our VIPER rover will travel to the Moon’s south pole to search for ice and other potential sources and determine where they’re coming from.