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Who knew that Rice iced the moon?

It’s the ultimate case of fire and ice: hydrogen ions from the sun, carried to the moon by solar winds and comingling with the lunar soil’s oxygen-rich minerals to create water. At least that’s how scientists think recently discovered lunar ice may originate, and most of them are blown away by the find. But one man has known for years about the presence of water on the moon — space physicist and Rice Professor Emeritus John Freeman, whose Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment (SIDE) was placed on the moon in November 1969 as part of the Apollo space mission. Designed to measure ionized gases near the moon’s surface, SIDE took measurements near the lunar equator and was the first experiment to detect water vapor on the moon. But what Freeman and his Rice colleagues couldn’t realize 40 years ago was that water molecules also exist on the moon’s colder surface regions near the lunar poles. That exciting bit of new information was icing on the cake, or should we say “moon,” for Freeman.