Reports by sources who claim to either have seen the data themselves, or have other firsthand knowledge of its results and are claiming ice has been detected "are just plain wrong", Binder told SpaceCast.

'I know that there are all these reports and rumors going around, and that people would like to have an answer, but it's just not the way it works," he explained. Binder also said that a decision has been made to hold what he described as a "very preliminary" press conference to discuss the data "in the last week of February at the earliest, and it may go into early March."

But Binder reported that he and the head of the Spectrometer Group, Dr. William Feldman, were ecstatic on the data received from the spacecraft's neutron spectrometer thus far. "This data is beyond belief!", Binder said.

"It's just incredibly high quality data. I mean, we expected to get good stuff, but nobody expected anything this good." When asked to characterize that, Binder said that the spectrometer data "was showing just amazing sensitivity." He added that when the first spectrometer data was tallied after a single 14-day long pass around the Moon by the Lunar Prospector, "we could actually make out the composition of the surface area - the neutron flux, even after just one pass, allowed us to pick out individual features with confidence."

Binder said that the neutron data could yield an "early, preliminary estimate" of surface composition results, but the definitive word on whether there was water ice on the Moon would have to wait for the Gamma Ray spectrometer data, "which could take us six months" to analyze, he added. The analysis that he and Dr. Feldman were conducting was a slow, painstaking task, Dr. Binder said, because "one must correct for all of the effects" that the relatively weak signals return, along with accurate composition determinations. "What we want to avoid is to say something that we will have to come back later and contradict." He stressed that when he steps before the cameras at months end, "that will just be a preliminary assessment of what we've seen."

Binder's interview with SpaceCast was among the first on-the-record discussions of the satellite data analysis now underway at NASA since a hail of rumors swept through the space science community last week. The reports, from a variety of sources, claimed that the data strongly indicated the presence of water ice on the Moon's South Pole. "That might turn out to be true," Binder said Monday afternoon. "And again, it might not. We just don't know yet."

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