Context

• 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.

About Chandrayaan 3’s findings

• The findings comprise the first analysis of the composition of the topsoil in the Moon’s southern latitudes, and support the widely-accepted hypothesis that the lunar surface in the immediate aftermath of the Moon’s formation was covered by a sea of molten material.
• The data collected by the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) also contain new information about the elemental composition of the lunar surface that can help to better understand the evolution of the Moon.

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 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.

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: IE

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