[X] My Assistant

[marsbug]

This has just popped up in my news feed: NASA will be making an 'exciting' announcement regarding SOFIA observations of the Moon on the 26th... And that's more or less all we've got. Given what we know about the wavelengths SOFIA uses, and observation campaigns it's been used for that might be relevant to the Moon, I wondered if anyone might have any insight?

[marsbug]

Space.com is running an article which gives the names and positions of the presenters:

Naseem Rangwala, project scientist for the SOFIA mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, will be one of four speakers during Monday's news conference. She'll be joined by Paul Hertz, who leads NASA's astrophysics division; Jacob Bleacher, the chief exploration scientist for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate; and Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Apologies for the speculation, but from that and the information found by djellison I would not be surprised if this was a detection of molecular water, as opposed to hydroxyl, and might be pegged as significant for hopes of ISRU in the next decade or so. If they've actually found a big black rectangle, well more fool me.