The latest effort by science to answer whether there's ice on the moon has come up empty. There's no sign of a lunar skating rink in the mysterious polar craters -- or even a big slab of ice.The results of the most detailed radar study to date of the moon's shadowy poles don't mean the moon is bone-dry. But the apparent lack of large ice tracts suggests there isn't a big supply of life-sustaining water nearby if people ever wanted to colonize the moon."It certainly would have been nice to find some sort of lunar skating rink, or thick layers of ice, but it looks like it's just not there," said Bruce Campbell of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.Five years ago, NASA's Lunar Prospector orbiter found tantalizing evidence that deep, permanently shadowed craters at the moon's poles could harbor ice in their sunless depths.Prospector found elevated levels of hydrogen -- a component of water -- around the moon's poles, with the highest readings in the perpetually shaded craters. But the evidence for ice was indirect. Subsequent experiments that bounced radio waves off these craters revealed no sign of thick ice layers, although those tests penetrated only a few feet below the surface.Now, Campbell and colleagues at Cornell University have used the mammoth radar dish at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory to probe craters more deeply than ever before -- as far as 20 feet (6 meters) down. And still there's no sign of thick layers of ice.Campbell and colleagues at Cornell University say their findings support the idea that any ice in the moon's polar regions is in thin layers or widely scattered crystals mixed in with lunar soil.
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