Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 384,399 km, roughly thirty times the width of Earth. Its distance varies from around 356,400 km at perigee to 406,700 km at apogee. The Moon is currently receding by 38 mm per year.
The prevailing theory is that the Moon formed after a Mars-sized body named Theia struck the proto-Earth about 4.51 billion years ago. The oblique impact blasted material into orbit, which accreted into the Moon just beyond Earth's Roche limit. Isotope dating suggests the Moon formed around 50 million years after the origin of the Solar System.
Tidal forces have locked the Moon's rotation period to its orbital period, a 1:1 spin-orbit resonance, so it always keeps nearly the same face toward Earth. Because of libration, about 59% of the Moon's surface is visible from Earth over time. The far side is illuminated as often as the near side, once every 29.5 Earth days.
The dark spots are maria, vast solidified pools of ancient basaltic lava named from the Latin for 'seas'. Almost all the maria sit on the near side, covering 31% of that hemisphere compared with 2% of the far side. Most mare basalts erupted during the Imbrian period, 3.3 to 3.7 billion years ago.
Yes, water ice has been confirmed on the Moon, mostly in cold, permanently shadowed craters near the poles and more abundant at the South Pole. In 2009, LCROSS detected at least 100 kg of water in a plume from a shadowed polar crater, and in October 2020 several spacecraft reported molecular water even on the sunlit surface. The 2008 Chandrayaan-1 mission first confirmed surface water ice.
Humans first landed on the Moon with Apollo 11 on the 20th of July 1969, after Apollo 8 first carried humans into lunar orbit on the 24th of December 1968. By 1972, six Apollo missions had landed twelve people on the surface, with some staying up to three days.
The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km, roughly one-quarter of Earth's, about as wide as the contiguous United States. Its mass is 1.2% that of Earth, and its surface gravity is about one-sixth of Earth's. It is the fifth-largest moon in the Solar System and the largest relative to its parent planet.