(ORDO NEWS) — Chinese planetary scientists have discovered in samples of lunar rocks from the Chang’e-5 probe several fragments of minerals exotic for the Moon, which contain traces of a whole series of lunar volcanic eruptions, the existence of which geologists did not know before.
“We found seven particles of exotic lunar rocks in the samples of the youngest lunar basalts brought to Earth by the Chang’e-5 probe.
These fragments entered the Ocean of Storms from another region of the Moon, 50-400 kilometers away from the landing site of the apparatus.
They contain traces of a previously unknown series of volcanic eruptions, whose magma had a unique chemical composition,” the researchers write.
In November 2020, the Long March 5 launch vehicle was launched from the Wenchang Cosmodrome on Hainan Island.
She sent the Chang’e-5 apparatus to the Moon, which returned to Earth about 23 days after launch, collecting about 2 kg of lunar rock for study by PRC specialists both for scientific purposes and for a project to prepare for the construction of a research base.
A team of Chinese planetary scientists led by Liu Jianzhong, a professor at the Institute of Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, found traces of a previously unknown series of volcanic eruptions on the Moon about 2 billion years ago in rock samples from Chang’e-5. Scientists made this discovery while studying the structure and composition of over 3,000 tiny rock fragments collected by the Chinese probe.
Traces of ancient lunar volcanoes
When conducting this analysis, geologists found that seven particles were present in the soil samples at once, not similar in color, shape, and other properties to the typical rocks of the region of the Ocean of Storms, where the Chinese lunar probe landed in December 2020.
This forced scientists to study in detail the chemical and mineral composition of these fragments.
Subsequent analysis of these grains showed that they belong to seven different types of exotic lunar rocks, the closest analogues of which are found at a distance of 50-400 kilometers from the Chang’e-5 landing zone.
As scientists suggest, these exotic rocks were knocked out in the distant past by asteroid impacts from those regions of the Moon where such minerals occur, after which their particles fell to the surface of the Earth’s satellite at the point where they were subsequently collected by the Chinese probe.
Some of these particles, according to scientists, are of volcanic origin, while they have an extremely unusual chemical composition, not typical of all other known samples of lunar volcanic rocks.
This suggests that they were generated by a previously unknown series of ancient lunar volcanic eruptions, whose magma and lava had a unique set of properties.
As planetary scientists hope, the subsequent analysis of samples from Chang’e-5, as well as the delivery of new soil samples from the Moon to Earth, will help them find other traces of these eruptions and the volcanoes that gave rise to them.
Their analysis will help planetary scientists to supplement the current ideas of researchers about how the interior of the Moon cooled and “mixed” after the collision of its progenitor with our planet, the scientists concluded.
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