Researchers have for the first time observed samples brought back from the far side of the moon, detailing billions of years of history of volcanic activity.
The results are the first scientific analysis of samples recovered by China’s Chang’e 6 spacecraft, which scooped up about 2 kilograms of lunar soil and returned it to Earth in a capsule in June. An independent research team from China published separate papers in Science1 and Nature2 on November 15th.
“We can tell a story about the long history of volcanism and the different mantle sources on the far side of the moon,” said Qiu-Li Li, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and co-author of the Nature paper.
Chang’e 6 was China’s second mission to land on the far side of the moon, following Chang’e 4 in 2019. Both landed in the South Pole Aitken Basin, one of the moon’s oldest and largest craters formed by meteors. An influence from about 4 billion years ago.
But, as expected, the researchers found that the fine dust, which ranges in size from one micrometer to several hundred micrometers, contains a mixture of particles from different geological eras. Constant collisions between micrometeorites and high-energy solar particles can shatter rocks and leave the dust flying unaffected by the atmosphere and potentially landing elsewhere, said the co-authors of the Science paper. Yi Gang Shu, a petrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explains. Guangzhou Academy of Sciences.
By measuring isotopic abundances, Xu and his collaborators discovered that many of the dust particles came from lava that erupted to the Earth’s surface about 2.83 billion years ago. Another team found much the same results, but also found lava grains that are 4.2 billion years old. These and other studies show that the Moon was actively volcanically active for billions of years before becoming the nearly stationary environment we see today.
