Allright folks, I will be off to the George Bush Airport in a moment. It’s been a busy conference, dominated entirely by the news about Moon water, not all of which has to do with the discoveries in the last 6 months from LRO and Chandrayaan. For this other news, I hope you, dear reader, can wait until my story comes out in the magazine next week.

Ralph Lorenz of APL gave a talk yesterday that discussed the puzzling stillness seen in Titan’s northern lakes. Given the moon’s super-rotating atmosphere and low gravity, one might expect Cassini to see some choppiness on the hydrocarbon seas. Lorenz lays out two possibilities to explain this: Either the lakes are viscous and stiff, or the changing seasons will bring winds to the north — which means that Cassini, in its new Solstice Mission, ought to catch some breakers in the act.

I had the pleasure today of speaking to Bruce Hudson, a 46-year-old resident of Midland, Ontario in Canada and a lifelong fan of stars and planets and all the things in the heavens that make our little lives on Earth seem at once small and exalted. Seven years ago, Hudson had a stroke that rendered the right side of his body mostly useless and forced him to leave his job as a groundskeeper for a Catholic shrine. He couldn’t really play video games. So he joined Stardust @Home, the crowdsourced effort to find bits of stardust buried within a spacecraft’s trap. For a few years, he scanned thousands of pictures, sometimes working 15 hours a day. And he ended up with the prize: the naming rights to the first bit of pure, interstellar dust to be brought to Earth. He called it Orion. Read the rest in my story up at the main Nature News site.

What doesn’t the Moon trap in its frigid poles? In a series of talks from the LCROSS team this morning, lunar scientists explained that water seemedo be just one among many volatiles trapped in the polar regions. In a talk, Peter Schultz of Brown University showed evidence for two strong emission lines appearing in the ejecta cloud a few seconds after impact. The bizarre best-fit for these lines? Silver. “If we can find ”https://www.nature.com/news/2009/091113/full/news.2009.1087.html">mercury on the Moon, maybe we can find silver," Schultz said.

So the obituaries for the Mars rover Spirit are a bit premature, says rover scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University, who I caught up with in the hallway here at LPSC. Since NASA headquarters held a press conference at the end of January announcing that Spirit would become a stationary science lander, the rover got itself unstuck and moved 34 centimeters using a sort of lateral ice-skating-like blading action. “We only stopped because we had to get ready for winter,” Arvidson said.

Arvidson said that the gimpy rover is still doing good stuff. He showed evidence for a soil profile of sulfate rich, water-soluble minerals. The most soluble ones are at the bottom of the profile – a sign that liquid water has acted gravitationally. Arvidson is also seeing the layered profiles match the wind-swept contours of the land. That suggests that the action of water is quite recent (geologically speaking) – probably about 100,000 years ago, the last time that Mars’ axis tilted enough to bring ice and frost down to the lower latitudes where Spirit roamed.

Arvidson acknowledges that Spirit will not be a “race car” again, but wants to look for similar soil profiles nearby. He says moving small distances would not jeopardize the radio science that is supposed to be the new priority with the rover acting as a science station.

Will the team get the money to keep all the engineers and drivers employed? The Mars budget is under significant duress as NASA struggles to pay for the shocking cost overruns of the Mars Science Laboratory, due for 2011 launch. Arvidson is waiting for the outcome of a ‘senior review’ of ongoing Mars missions to see how the most science per dollar can be extracted from Spirit’s tired robotic wheels.

David Shiga at New Scientist and Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society are also following this story.

There’s always a well-attended NASA night at LPSC, and tonight was no exception. Perhaps it was because Laurie Leshin, the new deputy associate administrator for the human space flight programme, was giving her first public talk. Leshin comes from a science background, and so she was speaking to ‘her people’. Everyone wanted to know how the big strategic changes at NASA, revealed in President Obama’s budget request, would affect research, particularly the lunar programme.

While a lot of the LPI crowd is grumbling about the cancellation of Constellation, they should be focusing on some new money that the human programme is bringing to the table: $3 billion over five years for “robotic precursor” missions. Leshin said that two of these missions, which could scout the Moon or an asteroid for resources, would start in 2011. Leshin later told me that Jay Jenkins at NASA headquarters is heading up an team of civil servants who are sketching out the process by which these missions and destinations will be selected.

Dave Kring of LPI asked Leshin a great question: Would the programme consider adding a sample return capability to one of these precursor missions? “I don’t think it’s out of the question,” she replied. It’s an interesting idea: two of the three finalists within Planetary Science’s New Frontiers competition are sample return missions — one to an asteroid and one to the South Pole Aitken basin of the Moon (the third is a Venus lander). What if the human programme could essentially pay for a top-priority New Frontiers science mission? It would be similar to the way LRO is doing all sorts of great fundamental science, even though the LRO scientists have to occasionally pay lip service to hunting for human resources.

It used to be that journalists joked about the multiple times that water was “discovered” for the first time on Mars. So when I heard that there would be an ad-hoc “water on the moon” press event today at LPSC, I wondered if I would hear about yet another wonderful watery lunar discovery.

To review: There has been an exciting flurry of discoveries that began in September, just as LRO was settling into orbit and finding hints that water lay in the frigid, permanently shadowed craters of the Moon’s north and south pole.

Just a week later, an instrument on India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellite showed that if scientists had just been looking a little more carefully in the near-infrared, they would have found a spectral signature for water and hydroxyl, right under their noses, distributed across nearly all latitudes of the Moon. Deep Impact and Cassini had also seen the signature, apparently. Faith Vilas had seen it even earlier, from a telescope on Earth, and no one believed her. Remember, however, that this is a different type of water to the chunks or bits of ice everyone imagined at the poles. It would be trace water, H2O molecules in the upper millimeter of soil, that had adsorbed onto minerals.

After the Chandrayaan result came the showtime of LCROSS — a not-so-spectacular crash that yielded a spectacular result: incontrovertible evidence that the impact had tossed up water. Yet more data from LRO and LCROSS were presented at AGU in December.

As a result, the packed-room LRO talks today didn’t surprise me too much, though the data set is getting richer and richer, and making the case for a watery and dynamic moon stronger and stronger. My favorite result came from the LEND instrument on LRO, which counts neutrons as a proxy signature for hydrogen, in turn a proxy for water. Sure enough, LEND, which probes the upper metre of soil, is finding strong evidence for water. But strangely, the hydrogen enrichment isn’t confined to the permanently shadowed regions. In fact, three areas outside of the craters — where they get lots of hot, bright sunlight — showed statistically significant evidence for water.

So what was the press conference all about? I’m not quite sure. Perhaps it was organized to showcase Paul Spudis’ radar work from Chandrayaan, which is about to be published in GRL. Spudis and others have been talking about using radar to detect ice on the moon for years. But other media are taking that as the news of the day.

And in some ways, they are right for paying a little attention to Spudis. If he is right, this will be a third type of ice, much more significant in abundance than the trace amounts of the adsorbed molecules, and the percent or two pore-space bits that LEND and the other LRO instruments are finding. Spudis’ radar would be detecting millions of tons of blocks or chunks of ice in the upper 10 metres – something that would indeed be incredibly useful as a resource if humans ever returned. Ben Bussey, who took over for alleged NASA spy Stu Nozette on a similar instrument on LRO, should have the capability to follow up on Spudis’ work.

Bottom line? The moon is not a dry, dead desert but a wet (well, damp at least) and wild one — with at least a few different types of ice. “There’s not just one flavor of ice on the moon,” said LCROSS’s Tony Colaprete. So let’s stop talking about the discovery of water, and move on to the more interesting questions, which will take months and years to solve: How did the water get there? Is it mostly from the continuous stream of protons emplaced by solar wind? Or do comets and asteroid impacts play a big role? How does the water move around? What percentage of the water is adsorbed molecules? What percentage is ice filling pore space? And what portion of it is the solid chunks that could nourish human exploration?

Here we are back in the Woodlands, Texas, about 45 minutes north of Houston, for the 2010 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Last year, LPSC moved to the Woodlands because it had outgrown the modest conference center in League City, south of Houston near Johnson Space Center.

And like many Texas towns, this conference just keeps growing. As of Monday midday, 1282 of 1596 paid registrants had already shown up –- compared to the 1,144 people of 1,495 that had arrived early on the first day last year.

This year marks the 40th LSPC conference, and organizers put out a call to see who had attended every single one. Everett Gibson was a 28-year-old freshly minted PhD when he took a job at the Johnson Space Center in 1969, hoping to find water in the very first moon rocks from Apollo 11. At the first LPSC in the spring of 1970, in the long-since-disappeared Albert Thomas Convention Center, he had been working on the rocks for less than a year. Over a hundred teams worldwide had been given rocks to analyse, and the rules were simple. “Each team had to prepare a manuscript for LPSC, and we could not talk to other scientific groups before the meeting,” says Gibson. “The world’s press were there. Everybody came.”

But not everyone came to this year’s photo shoot: 40-year veterans Peter Schultz, Jim Head and Larry Taylor were at this year’s meeting, but missing. In the picture, sitting in the bottom row, from left to right, is: Everett Gibson, Don Bogard and Gary Lofgren. Standing from left to right are Dmitri Papanastassiou, Don Burnett, Bob Clayton, Larry Nyquist, and Dominic Noto. Since the beginning, Noto has operated a limousine service for the conference, shuttling scientists to and from hotels and airports. He was offered an honorary spot in the photo. “I still come out here and enjoy driving with them,” he says.

That’s it for me this year, since I have to catch a flight in the morning. I had lots more I was hoping to highlight, but I ran out of time. Hope to see you all next year.

Up at the main Nature News site, I have a new Q&A with Steve Squyres, the newly selected chair of the next solar system decadal survey.