Recent article in MIT Technology Review (TR) at 2012-05-30 about how the Soviets found water on the Moon in 1976
Recent article in MIT Technology Review (TR) at 2012-05-30 about how the Soviets found water on the Moon in 1976
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428030/soviet-moon-lander-discovered-water-on-the-moon/
but because it was published  in an obscure magazine "Geokhimiia" (Geochemistry) in Feb 1978, the Americans didn't know about it, and stupidly spent all this time and money to independently rediscover it in 1989 Galileo's flyby of the moon, 1994 Clementine mission, 1994 Lunar Prospector, and definitively in 2009 interplanetary bombardment with LCROSS [1], etc...

Since the article came out, there was a lot of brouhaha about. That's quite a  scoop by the Soviets. Or not.

If you get past the misleading headline, skip over the article and just go straight to the references on the bottom, you'll see that TR article came out of an excellent "Historical Overview on Water on The Moon" by Arlin Crotts, including references to Third Reich Cosmology, etc.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1205/1205.5597.pdf (part 1/3)

To put it in perspective, Appolo returned 382 kg of moon rocks, picked by amateur geologists from 6 sites 1969-1972. Some didn't have any water, some did, but was shown to be Earth contamination by isotopic analysis. Later, a real Moon water was found in them. http://www.space.com/8033-water-discovered-apollo-moon-rocks-comets.html Appolo also left behind instruments to measure atmosphere and found no water. The amature geologists on the Moon and professional back on Earth, found no evidence of hydrated minerals. Etc...

In comparison, Luna 24 brought back 0.170 kg of rocks from a random point in 1976 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_24), in which some water was found (no water was found in either Luna 16 (0.101 kg), or Luna 20 (0.055 kg) sample returns), but nobody really knew if it was contamination from the lab or not. The authors of the Sovier paper explicitly said they didn't know for sure. No isotopic analysis was ever made. Why not? Maybe, being cut off from the west by the KGB, it did not occur to them to use this standard in the west technique. Nor did they invite western scientists to participate in or review their work.

I am guessing the real reason the Soviets didn't publicize the "findings" was because they didn't want to attract attention to the fact just how badly they lost the Moon race. Nor did they ever made any attempts to to follow up on them. In 1979 Afghan war started, in 1981 Reagan came to power, and soon they were broke.

[1] A lot of 3rd-graders were pissed, when they didn't see the plume, they were eagerly waiting for at 4:30 a.m. PDT on Oct 9, 2009. It's the second strike after the Pluto debacle. Next time, more power! Impact mass of 2.3 tons moving at 2.5 km/s is only 0.002 kt. Still, it released about a ton of water.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428030/soviet-moon-lander-discovered-water-on-the-moon/

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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