Who Found Water On Moon, NASA Or ISRO

The controversy around the discovery of water on moon is picking up. There are rumors/reports that some prominent science journals denied or rejected the papers submitted by Indian scientists in favor of paper submitted by the NASA.

Indian space agency's officials gave different comments to news papers. But the agency never never released any official statement about the discovery of water on moon through Indian equipments.

On the contrary, ISRO released a statement on 2 March, 2010, "Analysis of data obtained by the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) onboard Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has provided evidence for the presence of ice deposits near the moon's North pole. The Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters (2-15 km in diameter) with sub-surface water ice located at their base. The interior of these craters is in permanent sun shadow."

Mini-SAR was an American equipment.

One of the fuel for this rumor is a paper submitted by R. Sridharan. The paper was originally received by a journal on 11 November, 2009. It was revised on 22 January 2010 and accepted on 24 February 2010.

According to the excerpt available here, "Direct detection of water in its vapour phase in the tenuous lunar environment through in situ measurements carried out by the Chandra’s Altitudinal Composition Explorer (CHACE) payload, onboard the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of Chandrayaan I mission vindicates the presence of water on the surface of the moon in form of ice at higher lunar latitudes inferred from IR absorption spectroscopy, (especially that of OH), by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) of Chandrayaan I.

The quadrupole mass spectrometer based payload, CHACE, sampled the lunar neutral atmosphere every 4 s with a broad latitudinal (not, vert, similar40°N to 90°S, with a resolution of not, vert, similar0.1°) and altitudinal (from 98 km up to impact on the lunar surface with a resolution of not, vert, similar0.25 km) coverage in the sunlit side of the moon for the first time. These two (CHACE and M3) complementary experiments are shown to collectively provide unambiguous signatures for the distribution of water in solid and gaseous phases in Earth’s moon.

According to Wikipedia article, "The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) crash-landed  on the lunar surface on 14 November 2008, near the crater Shackleton at the south pole. The MIP was one of eleven scientific instruments (payloads) on board Chandrayaan-1.

The MIP separated from Chandrayaan at 100 km from lunar surface and began its nosedive at 14:36 UTC going into a free fall for thirty minutes. As it fell, it kept sending information back to the mother satellite which, in turn, beamed the information back to Earth. The altimeter then also began recording measurements to prepare for a rover to land on the lunar surface during a second Moon mission planned for 2012.

Following the successful deployment of MIP, the other scientific instruments were turned on, starting the next phase of the mission.

After scientific analysis of the received data from MIP, Indian Space Research Organisation confirmed presence of Water on Lunar soil and published the finding in a press conference addressed by its then Chairman Sri.G.Madhavan nair."

However, there is no official press release from ISRO to claim discovery of water on the moon.

There are some unanswered questions. What is the fact behind rumors that Indian papers were rejected by prominent journals? Lack of evidence shows it was nothing but a baseless accusation. Why ISRO never made any public or official announcement about the discovery, if their equipment found water on Moon? ISRO had not yet replied to our mail; till then the credit of discovering water on moon remains with NASA.

On 13 November 2009, NASA announced that its equipment on-board Chandrayaan discovered water on the Moon.