The new moon rock basalt was found in an impact crater within the moon’s Mare Imbrium area, and contains what unnamed officials are calling very “unique compositional characteristics”. Even though it did not move, the Chinese rover still managed to send information back on Earth, dispelling the fear that it was destroyed during the landing process. “After some 40 years since the Apollo and Luna missions, China’s Chang0e-3 (CE-3) landing and Yutu rover mission in December, 2013, provided the next robotic in situ measurements on the moon”. Now peer towards the northernmost edge of that dark circle-that’s where the Yutu rover sits among these basalt rocks, slowly gathering dust.
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The Apollo and Luna missions sampled basalt flows formed during the height of the Moon’s volcanic period.
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Learning more about the moons’ rocky composition could help scientists better understand the evolution Earth’s natural satellite. Chang’e 3 is the unmanned lunar mission from China, and that is using a rover known as Yutu or the “Jade Rabit” on a lava flow that is comparatively young.
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Yutu is the name of the marauding rover, which is part of the Chang’e 3 unmanned space mission.
Because the lava flow is relatively young, its composition hasn’t been compromised by errant debris from space. Image credit: Zongcheng Ling et al, doi: 10.1038/ncomms9880.
The titanium value in particular is really important, because it’s a good indication of how, when, and where volcanic magma first formed on the Moon. “Possibly there were big impacts during the magma ocean stage that disrupted the mantles formation”.
“From a correlated analysis of the regolith derived from rocks at the Chang’e-3 landing site, freshly excavated by Zi Wei crater, we recognize a new type of lunar basalt with a distinctive mineral assemblage compared with the samples from Apollo and Luna, and the lunar meteorites”, Dr Ling and co-authors said.
Essentially, The Guardian explained, minerals in molten rock tend to crystalize at different temperatures, thus the newly found moon rock provides some insight into the deep interior of the moon.
The mission landed on a smooth basalt plain.
Washington University press release informed, “The rocks themselves have an “intermediate” amount of titanium versus the Apollo or Luna samples, which have either very high or very low amounts of the element”.
In the meantime, China has thrown its hat into the lunar-visiting ring.
“The diversity tells us that the moon’s upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth’s”, said study author Bradley Jolliff of Washington University. “We see the same signal from orbit in other places, so we now know that those other places probably have similar basalts”.
Titanium is especially useful in mapping and understanding volcanism on the Moon because it varies so much in concentration, from less than 1 weight percent TiO2 to over15 percent. “We now have “ground truth” for our remote sensing, a well-characterised sample in a key location”, Jolliff said.
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“Given these data, that is our interpretation”, Jolliff said.
