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In July 2008, water was found conclusively for the first time inside ancient moon samples brought back by Apollo astronauts

gathered by the Apollo 15 mission

new analytic technique to detect water

The discovery of "significant amounts" of water in moon rock samples collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts is challenging a longstanding theory about how the moon formed

Since the Apollo era, scientists have thought the moon came to be after a Mars-size object smashed into Earth early in the planet's history, generating a ring of debris that slowly coalesced over millions of years

That process, scientists have said, should have flung away the water-forming element hydrogen into space

Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to

Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone

13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease

A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life

This water could be some of the oldest on the planet and may even contain life

the similarity between the rocks that trapped it and those on Mars raises the hope that comparable life-sustaining water could lie buried beneath the red planet's surface

Scientists

have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres.

Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres when portions of its icy surface warm slightly

In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowed into Jupiter

The comet also left behind

millions of gallons of water. Water from the impact still makes up at least 95 percent of the water in the planet’s upper atmosphere

When the Bering Strait (box, lower left) was closed at the height of the last ice age, any sudden influx of fresh water to the North Atlantic couldn't flow through the Arctic Ocean to the North Pacific, making episodes of abrupt climate change much more likely.

Much of the last ice age was characterized by violent climate swings

beginning about 80,000 years ago, average temperatures in and around the North Atlantic rose or fell by 10°C or more in the course of a decade or two—a pattern that lasted for 70,000 years

Australian scientists have identified vast freshwater reserves buried beneath the oceans

According to the latest report documented in the journal Nature

researchers have revealed the presence of nearly half a million cubic kilometres of low salinity water located beneath the seabed on the continental shelves

Confirming decades of suspicion, a NASA spacecraft has spotted vast deposits of water ice on the planet closest to the sun

Temperatures on Mercury can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius

around the north pole, in areas permanently shielded from the sun's heat

The search continues for life in subglacial Lake Whillans, 2,600 feet below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—but a thrilling preliminary result has detected signs of life

At 6:20am on January 28, four people in sterile white Tyvek suits tended to a winch winding cable onto the drill platform

One person knocked frost off the cable as it emerged from the ice borehole a few feet below

Finding water in the moon's crust, the scientists say, implies that the moon's rocks could have taken longer to crystallize than previously thought

NASA's Clementine spacecraft found evidence of water ice after scanning the surface with radar in 1996

follow-up observations with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico suggested the spots where it found ice were in areas with too much sun for ice to survive

Now, according to an article published yesterday in the journal Geology, there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its interior as well.

The amount of water in the meteorites suggested that the Martian mantle contains somewhere between 70 and 300 parts per million of water—an amount strikingly similar to Earth’s own mantle. Because both the samples contained roughly the same water content despite their different geological histories on Mars, the researchers believe that the planet incorporated this water long ago, during the early stages of its formation. The paper also provides us with an answer for how underground water may have made its way to the Martian surface: volcanic activity.

Ancient clay deposits on Mars may not indicate that the Red Planet was originally a warm, wet place, as scientists have thought. Instead of needing liquid water to form, many of Mars’ 4-billion-year-old clays could have originated from cooling lava, researchers report

last year, some researchers suggested that underground hydrothermal activity provided the water that is necessary to form the clays

“We’re not saying all clays on Mars formed by this process,” says coauthor Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary geologist at Caltech. However, “if most clays formed by a magmatic process, it says maybe water wasn’t so available on early Mars.”

The first terrestrial discovery of ringwoodite confirms the presence of massive amounts of water 400 to 700 kilometers beneath Earth's surface

Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral peridot, believed to exist in large quantities under high pressures in the transition zone

Ringwoodite has been found in meteorites but, until now, no terrestrial sample has ever been unearthed because scientists haven't been able to conduct fieldwork at extreme depths

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has

spotted water vapor above the moon's frigid south polar region, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface

Scientists had previously detected evidence of an ocean under Europa's icy crust

The giant asteroid Vesta appears to have

hydrogen

Dawn spacecraft reveals hydrated minerals in a wide area around Vesta’s equator