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Quite annoying that NASA won’t be including any instruments on the VIPER lander to detect heavy metals at the lunar South pole, only for detecting water and light elements. Nor will the Astrobotic Peregrine commercial lander. The LCROSS mission provided tantalizing hints of valuable metals from its orbital observations: Moon Blast Reveals Lunar Surface Rich With Compounds. Science Oct 21, 2010 2:05 PM EDT. There is water on the moon … along with a long list of other compounds, including, mercury, gold and silver. That’s according to a more detailed analysis of the chilled lunar soil near the moon’s South Pole, released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/its-confirmed-there-is-water And a Japanese lunar orbiter gave indications of uranium: Uranium could be mined on the Moon. Uranium could one day be mined on the Moon after a Japanese spacecraft discovered the element on its surface. By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 4:58PM BST 01 Jul 2009. The space probe Kaguya detected the radioactive element in samples of the Moon's surface with a gamma-ray spectrometer, along with thorium, potassium, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron. The discovery opens up the possibility of mining operations on a commercial basis or even nuclear power plants being constructed on the Moon. https://web.archive.org/web/20110423155534/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5711129/Uranium-could-be-mined-on-the-Moon.html The later Surveyor landers on the Moon since the 60’s all contained x-ray spectrometers(XRF) for detecting heavy elements. And all of the Mars landers since the Viking landers in the 70’s either had XRF spectrometers or more accurate alpha-proton x-ray spectrometers(APXS) for detecting heavy elements. Moreover, both the Indian lunar south polar lander and the Chinese lander to the Moon’s South Pole will contain instruments for measuring heavy elements. It’s bizarre that the U.S.’s landers VIPER and Astrobotic Peregrine to the lunar South Pole will be the only ones to ANY space body, probably numbering into the couple of dozen now, that won’t have instruments for detecting heavy elements. There’s no guarantee that India or China will share with the U.S. the discovery by their landers of valuable metals or other minerals on the Moon. They would probably figure if the U.S. didn’t see the importance of including such instruments on their own missions to the lunar South Pole, then that’s their problem. Robert Clark