India's Lunar Mission Finds Remnants of Magma Ocean on Moon

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Facts

  • Ahead of the first anniversary of its successful landing on the south pole of the Moon, India's Chandrayaan-3 mission has uncovered evidence that a vast magma ocean may have once existed under the lunar surface.[1]
  • According to a study published in Nature on Wednesday, Chandrayaan-3's Pragyan rover analyzed the moon's high-latitude region and collected the first samples of regolith (the layer of loose rock and dust particles above bedrock) from 23 locations using an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.[2][3]
  • The outermost layer of lunar soil had traces of ferroan anorthosite, bolstering the lunar magma ocean hypothesis, which posits that when the moon formed 4.5B years ago, heavier minerals sank inward to form its mantle while lighter rocks floated to the surface, creating the outer crust.[4]
  • The lunar soil samples collected by the Pragyan rover matched those obtained by astronauts on NASA's Apollo and the Soviet Union's Luna missions to the moon's equatorial and mid-latitude regions in the 1970s.[5][6]
  • The researchers also discovered sodium, aluminum, magnesium, potassium, iron, titanium, chromium, and manganese, among other elements, which are typically found at a depth of nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles). They suggest these materials came from a 2.5K-kilometer (1553 miles) wide crater in the moon's south pole.[7][8]
  • The orbital data shows the chemical and elemental composition of the regolith collected from the moon's rocky surface is fairly uniform over the 103 meters where the rover operated during its nine-day mission on Aug. 23, 2023.[9][10]

Sources: [1]The Times of India, [2]The Wire, [3]Cosmos, [4]BBC News, [5]USA Today, [6]Washington Post, [7]ThePrint, [8]ABC News, [9]Nature and [10]The Conversation.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by USA Today and Nature. This discovery is a game-changer for spacefaring nations' dreams of ultimately building a human base on the moon. If ice water is also discovered on the moon's south pole, it will facilitate prebiotic chemistry that can produce and feed life and make deep-space expeditions to places like Mars possible.
  • Narrative B, as provided by The Wire and Popular Science. This research is debatable because the Pragyan rover found more olivine elements than pyroxene elements on the lunar surface, contradicting the findings of previous missions. Moreover, the moon lacks plate tectonics — even if there's liquid water, it may lack the organic chemistry necessary to support life.

Predictions