Chinese rover discovers new type of moon rock

Now, Chinese researchers who have analyzed samples drilled by the rover say they’ve discovered a new type of lunar rock unlike anything the Americans or Soviets had brought home before. This particular discovery would be the very first time across four decades of a new finding being confirmed to be present on the moon’s surface, now how about that to excite all of you lunar-philes out there?

The analysis also helped solve a mystery originally discovered by the Chang’e-3 lander while it was in orbit. In any case, the picture we’re building of the Moon is in stark contrast to the situation on Earth, where the mantle cooled relatively uniformly.

The mission landed on a smooth basalt plain. This is an impact site visible from Earth which seems to be filled with hardened lava. The debris from the collision coalesced and cooled, but radioactive elements deep in the interior heated up the rock beneath the crust, and 500 million years later, volcanic lava slurped into impact craters on the moon to form the so-called “seas” or maria. Since then, we’ve continued to study the Moon’s surface from afar, using remote orbiters.

Yutu experienced a mechanical control abnormality in 2014, but it was revived within a month and, though it is unable to move, it continues to collect data, send and receive signals, and record images and video. But China’s rover, dubbed Chang’e-3 Yutu or Jade Rabbit, determined that these newfound rocks have a different mineral composition.

Since the ending of Apollo program, American lunar exploration has been conducted from orbit, and the orbital sensors have found the regolith to be typically mixed and hard to interpret. This crater, in particular, had conveniently excavated bedrock from below the regolith.

The Imbrium basin, where the rover landed, is perhaps the most prominent of these basins, and this is the first time scientists have been able to study its younger lava flows, estimated to be less than three billion years old.

“We now have “ground truth” for our remote sensing, a well-characterized sample in a key location”, Jolliff said.

“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”, the study authors wrote.

“The diversity tells us that the moon’s upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth’s”, said Prof. Scientists from a number of Chinese institutions involved with the Chang’e-3 mission formed one partnership; the other was a long-standing educational partnership between Shandong University in Weihai, China, and Washington University in St. Louis. They argue that having more information on the lunar rocks helps scientists understand better how the moon was formed and what was its history.

The Yutu rover’s instruments started examining lava that probably flowed about 3 billion years ago.

As the country continues to harness its newfound wealth and power to take on more space projects, its only a matter time before we see it on an equal footing as Russian Federation. The intermediate levels found in the new sample suggest that impacts during the moon’s magma ocean stage may have disrupted mantle formation.

The mineral sinks into the mantle as it crystallizes, forming pockets that are rich in titanium. Yutu was deployed on the moon in December 2013 after more than 40 years of human absence on the lunar surface (U.S. astronauts’ last visit to the moon was in 1972).