The discovery of water on the moon was heralded by scientists in Utah and across the nation as a turning point in human probing of the solar system.

"You cannot overstate the significance of this discovery," Seth Jarvis, director of the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, said Friday. "It means that the colonization of the rest of the solar system just got a lot more likely. It's a discovery that confirms that there's no such thing as a dead planet and opens the door to permanent installations on the moon."

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation, announced Friday, came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount," Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, said from Los Angeles while holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons, and that's only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

The timing couldn't be better for the Clark Planetarium. NASA contracted with the planetarium in April to create a nine-minute video, "LRO LCROSS," simulating last month's real mission to poke a hole in a huge crater at the moon's south pole.

It's also thrilling to think about the possibilities, Jarvis said.

"H2O there means you don't have to haul water from Earth, and it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. That's rocket fuel, and that means you not only have a sixth the gravity of Earth to deal with, you don't have to haul everything with you," Jarvis said.

Staging trips from Earth is hugely hampered by just getting away from the gravitational pull, he said. "It's like wanting to explore the Earth's surface, but every time you have to crawl out of the Grand Canyon before you can even start."

Being able to sustain life with water and agriculture and stage deeper solar system missions "without having to crawl out of the bowl of gravity on Earth are now real possibilities," he said.

It was NASA's Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation of water in the 60-mile-wide Cabeus crater.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one," said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

But the discovery comes with a catch, Jarvis said.

"The water LCROSS found exists in a polar crater where the angle of sunlight is so shallow that the bottom of the crater is perpetually in shadow," he said. "That means that processing lunar water using solar power makes the location of the shaded crater bottom relative to a place where you can also collect sunlight for energy is going to be tricky. As the real estate agents like to say, it's all location, location, location."

Knowing precisely where the water is and learning how to get at it and use it will require a lot more exploration, Jarvis said.

The Clark Planetarium video can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB6Q96eBGwk.

Contributing: Associated Press

e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com