This week's discovery of signs of water on the Moon has received quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media. Most of it has been pretty superficial.
Kudos to the New Yorker for publishing an article that clearly explains how the water was discovered, who made the discovery, and what it means.
It was a ten-hour flight from takeoff to landing, wheels up just after 6 p.m., from Palmdale, California, out over the Pacific. For the first nine hours and forty minutes, Casey Honniball, a twenty-seven-year-old planetary scientist, didn’t have much to do. She took a nap, ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and used her laptop to work on research proposals. The plane seemed bigger than usual—almost all of the seats had been removed, along with much of the fuselage’s interior panelling—and it was very cold and very loud. In the main cabin, which looked like mission control, her fifteen fellow-passengers worked at alternating intervals behind giant computer consoles. A large blue rotating fixture, resembling a bank-vault door studded with scientific instruments, dominated the plane’s rear wall. It was the interior half of an eight-foot-wide infrared telescope, its mirrors angled out the left side of the plane and into space. Honniball watched its hydraulic counterweight move subtly and ceaselessly, compensating for turbulence.
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