Bangalore/Washington/London/New Delhi, Sep 24 - In a discovery that has rocked the scientific establishment and hailed as path-breaking, India's maiden lunar mission has found evidence of water on the moon.

'The moon has distinct signatures of water,' top American scientist Carle Pieters confirmed Thursday, a revelation that has brought space travel one big step from fiction to reality.

'The evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon was found by the moon mineralogy mapper (M3) of the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on board Chandrayaan-1,' M3 principal investigator Pieters said in a paper published in the journal Science.

M3 was one of the 11 scientific instruments on board the lunar spacecraft that was launched Oct 22, 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The mission was aborted Aug 30 after Chandrayaan-1 lost radio contact with Earth.

Once the mission was abandoned, there were many reports in the Indian media describing the ISRO effort as a failure. But scientists have now been vindicated by this discovery.

Crediting ISRO for its role in the findings, Pieters said: 'If it were not for them (ISRO), we would not have been able to make this discovery.'

The elated project director of the Chandrayaan-1 mission M. Annadurai said in Bangalore: 'The baby has done its job by helping us find water on the moon.'

Pieters said the discovery of water on the lunar surface would reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially change thinking on how it originated.

'Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, were discovered across the entire surface of the Earth's nearest celestial neighbour,' said Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island.

About 1,000 parts per million could be in the lunar soil, the paper noted.

'Harvesting one ton of the top layer of the moon's surface will yield as much as 32 ounces (907 grams) of water,' scientists involved in the discovery said.

Pieters said more evidence of water was found in the moon's high latitudes.

'It greatly expands current thinking about where water in any form was presumed to be located,' she pointed out.

Two NASA spacecrafts also confirmed the discovery of water by M3.