India over the moon with water discovery

Indian scientists are over the moon, after India's maiden spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, was confirmed to have found water on the lunar surface.

In Banglaore, home to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the agency's chairman, G. Madhavan Nair, said India's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on board the Chandrayaan, made the amazing findings.

"The historic discovery is that Chandrayaan-1 has discovered water on the moon. We truly believe it is path-breaking discovery.

"The quantity of water was more than we expected. Data collected from Chandrayaan-1 is phenomenal, it may take six months to three years to analyse it," Nair told reporters over the national television Friday.

America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) announced Thursday that its Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), carried by Chandrayaan under a joint project by Nasa Isro last October, had discovered water on the moon's surface.

The presence of water molecules was discovered in June this year but the Chandrayaan mission was aborted end of last month after it lost communication with ISRO ground station.

But Indian scientists claimed that the mission was a success as 95 per cent of the objective was completed, and the spacecraft managed to capture 70,000 images of the moon.