Lunar water: uses, evidence, and missions

Water ice at the Moon is studied mainly as a potential feedstock for life support, oxygen, and propellant once extracted and processed. Those uses are engineering goals, not results recorded in this dataset. NASA's overview of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is general orientation on why agencies pursue resource use on other worlds; it is not primary evidence for any mission outcome listed here.

Agencies and operators in this dataset that are pursuing lunar water-ice prospecting or related delivery include National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Indian Space Research Organisation, Blue Origin, and Intuitive Machines. Prospecting missions such as VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover), PROSPECT (Package for Resource Observation, in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Characterisation & Testing), and LUPEX / Chandrayaan-5 (Lunar Polar Exploration mission) aim to measure or sample polar volatiles. Other records cover payload delivery or host landers for ice-related instruments. A stated objective is not evidence that ice was found or extracted.

LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) impacted Cabeus crater in 2009; NASA announced water detection in the plume, and the mission record lists water ice at the detected evidence step. PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1) flew the TRIDENT drill and MSOLO spectrometer on Intuitive Machines IM-2 (Athena lander). NASA reports the drill hardware was exercised and that MSOLO scans attributed detected gases to the lander and Earth; the PRIME-1 record does not report a drilled regolith sample that demonstrated lunar water, and its water-ice evidence level remains targeted.

Finding water in an impact plume is not the same as measuring a usable deposit, extracting ice repeatedly, processing it into propellant or oxygen, or delivering a resource commercially. No record in this dataset documents commercial delivery of a lunar resource. For the full published mission set that lists water ice, see missions by resource.