The Chinese Chang’e 4 spacecraft is back in action for a 27th Monday on the far side of the moon, but it’s the previous Monday’s discoveries of the mission that are thrilling scientists.
The Chang’e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover will resume operations on Feb. 6 after hibernating during the harsh cold of the lunar night, according to Chinese state media Xinhua. But on Monday earlier, the rover came across a curious rock monster that the Yutu 2 Drive team was starting to call a “milestone.”
According to a Yutu 2 diary published Through Our Space, the Chinese linguistics outreach channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), mission scientists agreed with the drive team that the elongated rock was worth a closer look.
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The team then planned to approach the rock up close and analyze the rock with Yutu 2’s Visible and Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) instrument, which detects light scattered or reflected from materials to reveal their composition.
VNIS has been used to investigate a number of rocks and regolith samples along the path from Yutu 2 through the Von Kármán crater. These include unusual melt glass copies and possibly material from the moon mantle
While it doesn’t look particularly exciting to the untrained eye, the find has sparked interest among lunar scientists. “It appears to have a shard-like shape and is sticking out of the ground. That’s absolutely unusual,” Dan Moriarty, NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com.
“Repeated impacts, thermal cycling stresses and other forms of weathering on the lunar surface would all tend to break rocks down into more or less ‘spherical’ shapes, given enough time,” said Moriarty. “Think how rocky beaches wear stones over time to smooth, rounded shapes by pushing them repeatedly in the waves.”
Moriarty said that both the shard-like shape and the pronounced “ridge” that runs along the edge of the rock seem to indicate that this rock is geologically young and was placed relatively recently.
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“I would certainly guess an origin as impact ejecta from a nearby crater. of shock pressure the direct target undergoes, ”said Moriarty, adding that this initial assessment is just a guess.
Follow-up detections and data from VNIS will provide much more insight. Clive Neal, a leading lunar expert at the University of Notre Dame, agrees that, based on the images, the specimens are impact ejecta rather than exposed bedrocks. “The question I have is, are they locally derived? Hopefully the spectral data will allow an evaluation of the origins as local or exotic, that is, from outside this region,” he said.
Yutu 2 and the Chang’e 4 lander have already significantly exceeded their design lifetimes of 90 Earth days and one year, respectively. The rover has traveled a total of 2,060 feet (628 meters) since its deployment from the lander on January 3, 2019.
In November last year, China launched its Chang’e 5 lunar monster return mission. The mission resulted in 3.81 lbs. (1.73 kilograms) are fresh lunar samples delivered to the earth a little over three weeks later. CNSA last month published procedures for requesting samples for scientific analysis.
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