The Dark Side Of The Moon Was Once Illuminated With Erupting Volcanoes
While the near side of the moon, which faces the Earth, has been studied in-depth, the far side, or the “dark” side of the moon, has remained largely unexplored due to navigation and communication challenges.
Researchers know that volcanic activity once occurred on the moon’s near side, but could the same be true for the far side?
Recently, they analyzed the first rock and soil samples from the far side of the moon in two different studies and discovered evidence of volcanic eruptions that took place billions of years ago.
Back in June, China’s Chang’e 6 lunar lander collected samples of rock and soil from the moon’s far side. It was the first spacecraft to arrive in the area.
Over the course of two days, it used a robotic arm to retrieve four pounds of lunar material from the South Pole-Aitken basin, the moon’s largest impact crater. Afterward, it made its way back to Earth and touched down in Mongolia.
The mission took a total of 53 days, from the spacecraft’s launch to its return to Earth. Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a detailed analysis of the samples.
They used radioisotope dating to determine the age of the volcanic basalt. It revealed that an eruption happened around 2.83 billion years ago on the far side of the moon. No evidence of such an early eruption has ever been found on the near side.
“The relatively young age of the basalts (retrieved by Chang’e 6) is surprising, along with the composition being practically devoid of radioactive elements,” said Clive Neal, a co-author of one of the two studies and a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Overall, 180 fragments of basalt were examined. Most of them formed about 2.8 billion years ago, but one was formed 4.2 billion years ago. The findings suggested that the moon was molten for much longer than previously believed.
The new data has the potential to rewrite the history of how the moon came into existence. In 1959, the first image of the far side of the moon was taken by the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft.
The photo quality was poor, but it showed that the far side contained craters and lacked the large lava-filled basins that are on the near side.
After learning that the moon’s volcanic activity spanned both hemispheres for more than a billion years, the researchers want to investigate how volcanic activity persisted for so long, how it altered the moon’s surface, and what the moon’s overall geographical development looked like.
Lunar exploration missions in the future could play a critical role in getting down to the bottom of the mysteries of the moon.
The findings were published in the journals Nature and Science.
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