The Moon was probably once a slimy ball.
A year ago, the Indian Pragyan rover set off on a nine-day terrestrial adventure through a mysterious region of the Moon.
The rover found smooth terrain and places filled with rocks likely thrown through craters. Despite this variety, the lunar dirt observed at 23 other stops along its direction had a uniform composition. When Pragyan probed the ingredients of this surface material, called regolith, he ended up reinforcing the idea that the Moon once housed an underground magma ocean.
The effects appear in a news item published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The idea is that when an ancient object slammed into Earth, matter spread through space. Over time, it accumulated forming a sticky ball and cooled unevenly. The moon looked a bit like a chocolate covered cherry. The melted magmatic snow was filled with other elements. As the proto-Moon cooled, the soft matter began to crystallize. It was floating on the surface. Once in place, he formed a lid. Now, with the frigid environment of space isolated from the fabrics beneath the surface, the Moon’s magma ocean couldn’t cool so quickly.
The rover found that the terrain at the 23 locations where it stopped, all within 50 meters of the mission’s Shiv Shakti Point landing site, was uniform anorthosite and, more commonly, iron-containing.
This is a new tick for the LMO hypothesis: if the lunar magma ocean existed in the distant past, anorthosite would have formed when crystals from the early cooling process would have risen to the surface and shaped the lunar crust. . And billions of years later, the Indian Pragyan rover would run its tires over some of this terrain and examine it closely.
The Pragyan rover is part of the country’s Chandrayaan-3 mission. Its landing site at Shiv Shakti Point is about 350 kilometers from one of the most interesting places on the Moon: the Aitken Basin (SPA) of the South Pole.
It is the formula with the greatest impact in the Sun’s basin and the oldest on the Moon. It’s full of clues about the history of the Moon.
NASA also needs to put astronauts there someday. According to a technical report by a space company, the south pole of the Moon has good lighting conditions, adding places where sunlight arrives uninterruptedly throughout the year. In addition, it is possible that ice is trapped here. This can also provide a valuable resource for astronauts and can also aid in their missions by offering a local source of water and potentially fuel.
Pragyan explores a privileged place, for more than one reason.
In just over a week, Pragyan had received accurate research backed by knowledge of the tools delivered to India’s two lunar missions, Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2.
The findings of the U. S. missions have been a key element in the development of the U. S. The U. S. and Pragyan’s former Soviet Union broke up a century ago. Although Pragyan’s knowledge of regolith did not fit neatly with the effects of the 1972 missions (NASA’s Apollo 16 and the Soviet Union’s Luna 20), they were very closed. Since the three missions had geographically well-separated landing sites, the study authors said, the similarities in regolith suggest speculation that the moon did indeed possess a magma ocean. And that the first level of natural progression of satellites involved differentiation, or splitting, between the soft elements floating upwards, the heavier elements flowing underneath, and the hardening of the crust that slowed the cooling of the subterranean ocean of lunar magma.
The lunar south pole is undoubtedly a gateway to exploring the beyond of the Moon and the lofty ambitions of the future of space exploration.