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Mahesh

23/08/24 12:38 PM IST

First findings from Chandrayaan 3 mission

In News
  • Almost a year after Chandrayaan 3 landed on the Moon, scientists in India have released the findings of studies carried out by one of the instruments on the rover module.
Major findings
  • Scientists have reported three key findings.
  • The terrain around Chandrayaan 3’s landing sight is fairly uniform;
  • The Moon’s crust was formed layer by layer, which adds weight to the lunar magma ocean (LMO) hypothesis; and
  • The topsoil around the lunar south pole has a greater-than-expected sprinkling of minerals which compose the lower layers of the lunar crust.
  • The Moon is thought to have been formed after a large asteroid collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago.
  • Scientists hypothesise that in its early life, the Moon’s surface was made up entirely of an ocean of magma.
  • As this ocean cooled over millions of years, heavier silicon- and magnesium-rich minerals such as olivine and pyroxene sank to the lower levels of the lunar crust and its upper mantle (which is generally the largest layer inside a planetary body, bounded by the planet’s core on the inside and the crust on the outside).
  • Lighter minerals, composed of calcium- and sodium-based compounds, floated to the top and formed the upper crust.
  • The third APXS finding is a new discovery — and suggests that some “mixing” of the various levels of the lunar crust might have taken place.
  • The researchers have proposed that this “mixing” could have been caused by the asteroid impact that led to the formation of the South Pole Aitken (SPA) Basin, the largest and oldest basin on the Moon.
  • The SPA basin has a diameter of approximately 2,500 km — equivalent to the distance between Delhi and Kochi — and a depth of 6.2-8.2 km. It is believed to have been formed 4.2-4.3 billion years ago, when the asteroid hit near the lunar south pole.
  • The researchers theorise that this asteroid impact resulted in the excavation of magnesium-rich material from deeper layers of the Moon, out to the surface of the surrounding areas as ejecta.
  • The Chandrayaan 3 landing site was just 350 km from the rim of the SPA basin.
Significance of the findings
  • While these findings more or less support what is already known via modelling, imaging, and various hypotheses, they are novel nonetheless.
  • This is primarily because Chandrayaan 3 landed near the Moon’s south pole, a first in lunar exploration.
  • While the composition of lunar topsoil near the equatorial and mid-latitude regions have previously been studied by earlier Moon missions sent by other countries, this is the first time that such measurements have been carried out near the Moon’s poles.
  • This makes Chandrayaan 3 the first to carry out in situ experiments of any kind at the poles.
  • The rover moved within a 50-metre radius of the landing site, and took readings on different kinds of surfaces, from relatively smooth ones to near the rims of small craters.
  • The overall finding, which suggests that the topsoil near the landing site is fairly uniform, is novel.
  • Notably, the uniformity of the surface is unlike that of Earth, where tectonic plate movements led to the creation of undulating surfaces.
  • With measurements taken at 23 spots along the rover’s path, this is the first time that soil measurements on lunar highlands (light coloured, elevated basins on the Moon standing above dark-coloured basins known as maria) have been taken with such high frequency.
  • Other missions — such as the US’s Apollo 16, Russia’s Luna 20, and China’s Chang’e 4 — too have sampled the lunar highlands, but sparsely.
  • The total observation duration for the APXS measurements was about 31 hours, which were spread out over the mission period of 10 days.
Source- Indian Express

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