The Boston Globe put together a very neat page comparing photos from NASA’s moon landings to the photos taken by the LRO. You get a nice ground view comparison of what the astronauts saw and the top down view from the LRO.

It’s a breathtaking collection.

Photo courtesy of NASA (note the Earth in the upper right corner).

Even Google is getting in on the excitement. The LCROSS mission that lobbed a heavy missile into a crater in order to create a plume of ejecta that could be analyzed confirmed their theory that massive amounts of water could be contained in deep craters on the moon.

Why is this fantastic news? We need water to survive. It’s expensive to send water into space on shuttle launches (or any other space-bound object that takes propellant for that matter). With water available for use at our destination that means lots of other resources that can be packed up and launched with each mission.

This is a small  but valuable step in making a viable, permanent moon presence, as well as a launching point for the rest of the solar system. For those that dream of making it off this rock, it’s a huge leap in the right direction.