Soviet find of water on the Moon in the 1970s ignored by the West

***SOUL-DRIFTER*** · 06-06-2012, 12:21 AM

Go figure...

June 1, 2012 by Lin Edwards

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Luna 24

(Phys.org) -- In August 1976 Luna 24 landed on the moon and returned to Earth with samples of rocks, which were found to contain water, but this finding was ignored by scientists in the West.
US missions to the moon brought back a total of around 300 kilograms of moon rocks. Many samples were found to contain traces of water, but NASA believed the water was a contaminant originating on Earth, because lunar dust had clogged the seals of some of the containers and prevented them from being closed properly.
The presence of water on the moon will be important if a moon base is ever to be established, but for many decades the moon was believed by Western scientists to be dry. Three articles by Professor Arlin Crotts, an astrophysicist from Columbia University in New York, has now examined the history of scientific research on the presence of water on the moon and discovered that the Russians had found water in moon rocks in 1976.

Soviet find of water on the Moon in the 1970s ignored by the West

**Xeno** · 06-06-2012, 12:35 AM

One of the very smart comments on that article...

Originally Posted by [URL="http://phys.org/profile/user/Jonseer/"

Jonseer[/URL]Jun 01, 2012 ]

The article DID NOT say Western researchers knew this, or that they refused to invoke or work with Soviet data.

The article DOES SAY that the journal Geokhimiia does NOT have a wide readership among Western scientists, and its never been cited by a Westerner.

Your suspicions are groundless.

Nobody hid or denied anything. Western researchers likely NEVER saw it, and the Soviets apparently didn't make any effort to promote their findings outside their own mission.

As for denying their own findings, there was no hiding or denying either. There was sufficient doubt to prevent a conclusion in favor of water.

Science is constantly revising and changing conclusions.

Science does NOT claim to know everything, nor does Science claim to get it right the first time.

That is how religion works. NOT science.

**August** · 06-06-2012, 02:11 AM

Science is a crock........... if the Vatican went up there looking for holy water they would have none of these dramas.

***SOUL-DRIFTER*** · 06-06-2012, 02:12 AM

published their results in the journal Geokhimiia in 1978. The journal does not have a wide readership among Western scientists

Hmmm, so why not?
Surely western scientists knew Russia was sending probes there.
Why the hell would western scientist want to learn what they may have learned?!!

The article didn't say the mission was secret.

Makes no sense to me.

**Xeno** · 06-06-2012, 05:08 AM

Originally Posted by SOUL-DRIFTER

Hmmm, so why not?
Surely western scientists knew Russia was sending probes there.
Why the hell would western scientist want to learn what they may have learned?!!

The article didn't say the mission was secret.

Makes no sense to me.

How do you hear about discoveries made by NASA?
Most probably the internet...
And before that, most probably the media.
A few years after the US landed on the moon, interest in the subject quickly diminished.

There are a lot of scientific journals in the world, and a lot of them are in English now-a-days, but a lot also aren't.

It's a bit farfetched to believed that all western astronomers simply rejected the USSR's important discovery purely as the result of the dick measuring competition which plagued that era.
The government very well may have, they did a lot of stupid things back then to prove the size of their manhood. But I doubt the scientific community could be twisted that way.

***SOUL-DRIFTER*** · 06-06-2012, 07:53 AM

In 1976 there wasn't that many journals.
Also, it is not as if there were loads of countries sending probes to the moon.
Correct me if I am wrong...but, wasn't Russia the only other country sending probes to the moon back then?
So why wouldn't at least some scientist closely monitoring what Russia would discover there to help confirm or deny findings?

I think it was because it was intentionally ignored due to the relations with Russia at the time.
Western scientists being politically influenced.
How scientific...