material seen 50 years ago by the Soviet Union and NASA.

Exactly one year ago, India made space history by successfully landing the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander near the moon’s south pole, becoming the fourth country to do so. The Pragyan rover then began exploring the landing site, an area that gave scientists insight into the moon’s geology that had not yet been sampled. Now it has confirmed one of the most well-known theories.

Opening. Pragyan took 23 measurements while rolling across a 103-meter patch of the lunar surface, located 50 meters from the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, over a period of 10 days. The rover’s data marked the first measurements of elements in lunar soil near the south polar region.

And not only that. We now know, it seems, that these Prague measurements showed that the particular mix of chemical elements in the lunar soil (or regolith) surrounding the lander was relatively uniform. This regolith consisted primarily of a white rock called iron anorthosite. As we will see below, this finding seems to support the idea that the Moon was covered by a single magma ocean early in its history.

A theory from ten years ago. The sample found from this type of soft rock was very similar to samples taken from the equatorial region of the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. For this reason, the researchers focused on subsequent analyses, which led to the study published in the journal Nature.

Most importantly, the samples help solve remaining mysteries about how the moon evolved over time, including how it formed in the chaotic early days of the solar system. In other words, the presence of rocks like these in different parts of the moon appears to support the decades-old hypothesis that “the moon was once covered by an ancient magma ocean,” the study’s authors say.

Theories. While there are many hypotheses about how the moon formed, experts (mostly) agree that about 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object or series of objects slammed into Earth, spewing enough molten debris into the sky to form the moon. The first lunar samples collected during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 led to the theory that the moon was once a ball of molten magma.

The nearly 400 kilograms of moon rocks and soil that the Apollo missions returned to Earth in the late 1960s and early 1970s have disproved the idea that the moon was a celestial body trapped by Earth’s gravity or that the moon formed along with the Earth from the same debris. Rock samples showed that the moon was created about 60 million years after the solar system began to form, according to NASA.

Ocean of magma. According to this timeline, the magma ocean persisted for about 100 million years, likely hundreds to thousands of kilometers, and as it cooled, crystals formed within it. At this point, rocks and minerals such as the recently discovered iron-rich anorthosite are thought to have risen to the surface to form the lunar crust and highlands, while other denser, magnesium-rich minerals such as olivine sank deep beneath the surface mantle.

As they note in their paper, it is important to understand that the lunar crust, which has an average thickness of about 50 kilometers, is one thing, and the lunar mantle beneath it, which can be more than 1,300 kilometers deep, is another.

Pragyan confirms this. Which brings us back to the Indian rover. When Pragyan studied the chemical composition of the lunar soil, he found a mix of iron-rich anorthosite and other types of rock, including minerals like olivine. Chandrayaan-3’s landing site, called Point Shiv Shakti, was about 350 kilometers from the rim of the Aitken Basin at the south pole, thought to be the oldest crater on the moon.

The team believes that an asteroid impact created the basin “around 4.2 billion years ago and exposed magnesium-rich minerals such as olivine to the lunar soil,” explained lead author Santosh Wadawale. In fact, the next step will be to further investigate the presence of these minerals, which likely originated in the moon’s mantle and will likely allow us to understand and decipher the moon’s origin and evolution.

Image | NASA, APXSPOC, PRL

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