November 21, 2024
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The first rocks returned from the far side of the Moon show ancient volcanic activity
Remote lunar samples collected by China’s Chang’e-6 mission have recorded the moon’s turbulent history for eons
Researchers retrieve lunar samples from the Chang’e-6 return capsule.
Xinhua/Jin Liwang/Alamy Stock Photo
Researchers have taken their first look at samples brought back from the far side of the Moon, and the rocks reveal billions of years of volcanic activity.
The results are the first scientific analyzes of samples recovered by China’s Chang’e-6 mission, which scooped up nearly two kilograms of lunar soil and returned to Earth in a capsule in June. Separate articles were published by independent research groups in China science and nature on November 15
“We can tell a long history of volcanism and a history of different sources of the moon’s distant mantle,” says Qiu-Li Li, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a co-author. nature paper
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Dust the data
Chang’e-6 was China’s second lunar landing mission Chang’e-4 in 2019. Both landed at the South Pole–Aitken Basin, one of the oldest and largest craters on the Moon, formed after a meteorite impact nearly four billion years ago.
Rocks on the far moon reveal a history of volcanic activity.
As expected, the researchers found that the fine dust—ranging in size from one to hundreds of micrometers—contains a mixture of grains from different geologic eras. The constant bombardment of micrometeorites and high-energy solar particles turns rocks into dust, which can then fly unimpeded by an atmosphere and land elsewhere, explains author Yi-Gang Xu. science paper, and a petrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou.
By measuring the abundance of isotopes, Xu and his collaborators found that they were some grains of lava dust that erupted on Earth about 2.83 billion years ago. The other team’s findings were mostly similar, although the scientists also found 4.2 billion-year-old lava grains. These and other studies show that the Moon had active bilkanism for billions of years before it became the nearly stagnant environment we see today.
This article is and was reproduced with permission first published November 18, 2024.
