(Daily News Scan - DNS English) More Metallic Moon
For a few decades now Moon’s surface has been researched to find more about what it is made of and also about its origin. Very recently, a new milestone has been achieve In Lunar exploration by NASA. In this exploration, it was discovered that the MOON might have greater quantities of metals than thought before. The findings were published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
In this DNS we will look into detail what the NASA’s new findings reveal about the surface of the moon.
To get a better and clear understanding about the origin of Moon, scientists for several years now have been researching the surface of moon. Scientists have for years explored the presence of metal deposits on the satellite comparative to Earth. With time more data has been added and available for the researchers to refine their hypothesis. A new addition to the collection of this data has been made recently by NASA.
In a Lunar exploration conducted by NASA, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft had found evidence that the Moon’s subsurface might have greater quantities of metals like iron and titanium than thought before. The metallic distribution was observed by the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument aboard the LRO.
Out on a mission to look for ice in polar lunar craters, the LRO’s Mini-RF instrument was measuring an electrical property within lunar soil in crater floors in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. The property, known as the dielectric constant, is the ratio of the electric permeability of a material to the electric permeability of a vacuum.
The Mini-RF team observed that the level of this property increased as they surveyed larger craters, and kept rising in crater sizes up to 5 km in diameter. Beyond that size, the value of the dielectric constant levelled off. Essam Heggy, the lead author of the published paper and coinvestigator of the Mini-RF experiments, called the observation “a surprising relationship that we had no reason to believe would exist.”
AS per the NASA press release, the findings raise the possibility that the dielectric constant increased in larger craters because the meteors that created them dug up dust containing iron and titanium oxides from beneath the Moon’s surface. Dielectric properties are directly linked to the concentration of these metal minerals. If this is true, this concept would imply that beyond a few meters of the Moon’s upper surface– which relatively has lower metal deposits– lie large unknown quantities of iron and titanium oxides.
The findings made by the Mini-RF were backed by metal oxide maps from the LRO Wide-Angle Camera, Japan’s Kaguya mission and NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, showed that larger craters with their increased dielectric material were also richer in metals. The maps suggested that more quantities of iron and titanium oxides were dug up from 0.5 to 2 km below the Moon’s surface as compared from the first 0.2 to 0.5 km.
NASA has now undertaken further research to find whether the same relation between metal deposits and crater size holds true on the southern hemisphere of the Moon.
There are different theories and hypothesis related to creation of moon. The most popular theory about the Moon’s creation is that a Mars-sized protoplanet collided with newly formed Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, breaking off a piece of our planet that went on to become its satellite. The hypothesis is also backed by substantial evidence, such as the close resemblance between the Moon’s bulk chemical compositions with that of Earth.
However, it is also known that Earth’s crust has lesser amounts of iron oxide than the Moon, a finding that scientists have been trying to explain. Now, the new discovery of even greater quantities of metal on the Moon makes their job even more difficult.
As per an article in Science Alert, a possible reason could be that the Moon was created from a material much deeper beneath Earth’s surface than was believed before, or that the newly found metal presence could be the result of molten lunar surface cooling down gradually.
The new discovery made by NASA is probably going to challenge the previous theories and hypothesis about the moon.
