A few weeks ago, scientists from India announced that a satellite had detected water molecules on the Moon’s surface, a fact that was on the minds of NASA scientists early this morning as the U.S. space agency intentionally crashed a probe onto a giant lunar crater.

The hope was that the resulting explosion would kick up enough dust to allow sensors to detect just how much water might be hidden within the dust of what was once considered a giant, gray-desert orb (via The Associated Press).

All morning NASA has been abuzz, streaming live video of the crash from its Web site. You can bet that Jack Burns, a professor of astrophysics and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado and chairman of the science committee on NASA’s advisory council, was among the first to see footage of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite as the probe blew up.

“This is absolutely a game-changing event as far as the moon is concerned,” Burns (pictured) recently told 9News. “Because if there’s water on the moon, it changes the perspective of what we would be able to do in terms of setting a permanent outpost on the moon.”

That’s what Korea’s Chosun Ilbo notes, too, reporting, however, that finding water is only the first step toward such a future.

Greg Schroll used to dream he could bend a soccer ball like David Beckham. But it wasn’t his skills that could send the ball curving away; it was the soccer ball itself. Of course, cat toys can accomplish the same thing, but while he was at MIT, Schroll devised a more sophisticated, spherical botball (my word, not his, for the robotic invention) with special gizmos inside that allow it do to what other moving spheres cannot: climb upwards.

“Most people have a disclaimer saying their spherical robot can’t climb steep inclines or stairs. My goal was to overcome that limitation,” he tells Popular Mechanics magazine, which has dubbed the 23-year-old Colorado State University grad student one of the Top 10 Innovators of 2009 for accomplishing the task, keeping northern Colorado at the forefront of robotic invention.

Ideas of how exactly to apply the technology are at this point a bit hazy. The botball could one day be used in space exploration or search-and-rescue operations—or even by the military, where some generals dream of robot battalions.

“There’s so much more to do, almost an infinite number of things I could do with it,” he tells 9News.

One thing is clear, though: Beckham, aka. “Goldenballs,” is aging, but while he is somewhat marginalized by his English national team, the soccer star still seems a few years away from needing a botball to stay competitive.

“Bright-eyed, bouncy, and very friendly” is how the BBC described the world’s first three mule clones—Idaho Gem (pictured), Utah Pioneer, and Idaho Star—five years ago. The man who helped create them, Colorado State University veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences professor Gordon Woods, passed away late last week.

In 2003, Woods, Dirk Vanderwall of the University of Idaho, and Ken White of Utah State University brought Idaho Gem to life as part of a larger project intended to gauge why horses have a significantly lower rate of cancer than humans.

“Gordon’s hypothesis was that excessive intracellular calcium in human cells could be an underlying factor in age-onset diseases,” Vanderwall tells The Associated Press.

In recent years, leaders in thoroughbred horse racing and equine health donated $1.14 million to Woods’ laboratory to support his disease research, according to a CSU press release from earlier this year. Woods died at the Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, according to a CSU spokeswoman. His cause of death and age were not immediately available. As for Idaho Gem, he became successful on the mule-racing circuit in Nevada and California.