On Sep 24, 1:14*pm, Yousuf Khan wrote:
The Moon water was discovered by three separate spacecraft. The Indian
Chandrayaan-1 was the one given the credit for the discovery, while the
Deep Impact and Cassini probes were given the credit for the
confirmation. Chandrayaan-1 was specifically looking for this signature,
before it stopped working, so it looks like it completed this work. The
Deep Impact comet impactor probe swung by the Moon on its way to comet
Tempel 1, and detected the signature back then too. And prior to that
the Cassini Saturn probe passed by the Moon too and detected it. It's
kind of backwards, as the verifications came from probes that went
beforehand, whereas the discovery came afterwards.

CBC News - Technology & Science - Water traces found in moon's dirt
"The water was spotted by spacecraft that either circled the moon or flew by. All three ships used the same type of instrument, which looked at the absorption of a specific wavelength of light that is the chemical signature of only two molecules: water and hydroxyl. Hydroxyl is one atom of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, instead of the two hydrogen atoms in water."

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ter-probe.html

The water seems to be widespread throughout the Moon, it's not just in
shadowed Moon craters. The original Apollo astronauts brought back Moon
rock, but they couldn't find significant amounts of water. Or at least
they couldn't tell whether the water was from the Moon or Earth. This
resulted in the current favoured theory of Moon formation: The Giant
Impactor, which states an Mars-sized rock hit the Earth early on, and
created the Moon.

SPACE.com -- It's Official: Water Found on the Moon
"Apollo turns up dry

When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back several samples of lunar rocks.

The moon rocks were analyzed for signs of water bound to minerals present in the rocks; while trace amounts of water were detected, these were assumed to be contamination from Earth, because the containers the rocks came back in had leaked.

"The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth," said Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is a member of one of the NASA-built instrument teams for India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite and has studied the moon since the Apollo missions."

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...discovery.html

The widespread distribution of the water might be the start of a new
theory of Moon formation, though no one is really saying this directly yet.