Chandrayaan-3 landing site and APXS observation locations. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07870-7
India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission launched last summer, and its Vikram lander touched down on the lunar surface last August. Shortly after, it launched a rover named Pragyan. Since then, the rover has been roaming the lunar surface near its south pole, collecting and testing soil samples while measuring seismic activity and atmospheric conditions.
A team of geologists and planetary scientists from the Indian Physical Research Laboratory, working with colleagues from the UR Rao Satellite Centre and the Space Applications Centre, both in India, analyzed data from soil samples collected by Pragyan, finding evidence that supports theories that the moon’s surface was completely molten shortly after its formation.
In their article, published in the journal NatureThe group describes its analysis of radiation data returned by the rover’s alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer.
As part of the soil tests, the rover has used its alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer 23 times to learn more about the composition of the moon’s regolith. So far, data returned by the sensor has shown that all 23 samples are primarily iron anorthosite.
Data collected by other sensors have shown that the regolith in other areas, such as the moon’s equator and mid-latitude regions, is made of roughly the same material. The researchers note that this suggests that a uniform layer of material covers the moon.
Such a uniform layer supports theories that the entire surface of the moon was covered in molten magma early in its history, a result of its mode of formation. The same theory also suggests that the moon formed when a large object named Theia crashed into Earth, throwing vast amounts of surface material into space.
According to the theory, the material clumped together to form the Moon. This also explains why so many lunar rocks have a similar composition to those found on Earth. Such a collision would have generated a lot of heat, which would explain the layer of molten magma covering the Moon’s surface.
More information:
Santosh Vadawale, Chandrayaan-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at high lunar latitude, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07870-7. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07870-7
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