Dark Side Of The Moon Rock Sample Reveals A Volcanic Surprise But No Pink Floyd
The Chang’e-6 spacecraft landed on the Moon’s far side in June of this year, touching down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin. The area was chosen due to the belief the rocks there held a detailed history of volcanic activity spanning billions of years. Chang’e-6 was able to return nearly two kilograms of lunar soil, and then returned the sample to Earth later in June.
“We can tell the story for a long history of volcanism and different mantle sources on the lunar far side,” remarked Qiu-Li Li, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and a co-author of the recently published paper on the findings.
In the image above, the landing site, marked by a red dot, is shown in the south of the Apollo basin. The background image is an orthographic albedo map from Chang’e-2. In panels A and C, the younger basalts are labeled intermediate-Ti, and the older are labeled low-Ti.
In a press release, the researchers stated they found that the fine dust, ranging from one to hundreds of micrometers in size, comprised a mixture of grains from different geological periods. They explained that the “constant bombardment” of micrometeorites, and high-energy solar particles breaks up the rocks into fine dust.
Researchers measured the isotope abundances, which led them to believe a number of dust grains were from lava that erupted to the surface around 2.83 billion years ago. Other findings during the research had similar findings, although the scientists did find lava grains as old as 4.2 billion years.
One fragment was actually dated to 4,203 million years ago. The high-aluminum basalt fragment is said to be the oldest lunar basalt ever recorded. According to the dating, this would indicate elevated levels of volcanic activity on the far side of the Moon for at least 1.4 billion years, between 4.2 billion and 2.8 billion years ago.
As more missions are planned to land on the far side of the Moon, there are many more discoveries to be made. The Chang’e-6 findings are just fuel to find out more.
