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It would be nice if we could stop moving the goalposts to give credit to our favorite institutions. The Soviet probe Luna 24 in 1976 brought back samples that were found to be 0.1% water. "NASA and ISRO are the discoverers because they did the analysis without returning to earth" is such a cop-out.

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What did the Soviets do that was special? Did the samples from the Apollo missions not show any water content?

Very little. What was there was dismissed as contamination, though a 2008 analysis showed small amounts of water locked inside pieces of volcanic glass inside the Apollo samples. The recent tremendous emphasis on the Chandrayaan-1 mission is motivated largely by the failure of Chandrayaan-2.

That's not right. The Chandrayaan 2 failure has nothing to do with the Chandrayaan 1 discoveries. The lander of Chandrayaan 2 failed but it was not tasked with a follow-up science of any of these water-related discoveries. That is the job of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter.

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