Chinese rover reveals hidden structures deep under the dark side of the moon

Chinese scientists using the Chang'e-4 rover for the first time were able to visualize the upper 300 meters of the moon's surface. Their findings reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar history. Study this was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Since landing in 2018, Chang'e-4 is the first spacecraft ever to land on far side of the Moon, captures stunning panoramas of impact craters and analyzes minerals from the lunar mantle. Now he has allowed scientists to look a little deeper. His partner, the Yutu-2 lunar rover, helped with this.

The rover is equipped with Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) technology. It allows you to send radio signals deep below the surface of the moon, noted lead author of the study Jianqing Feng, an astrogeologist at the Institute of Planetary Science. “Then he listens to the dancing echo that bounces off underground structures,” he added. It is these data that allow you to create a map of the lunar interior.

In 2020, scientists used LPR to map the upper layers (40 meters) of the Moon's surface, but so far they haven't gone any further. The new study confirmed the old data and supplemented them with new ones.

Feng and his colleagues speculated that the rubble that surrounded this formation was an ejecta - debris from the impact. Deeper still, scientists have discovered five separate layers of lunar lava that seeped through the landscape billions of years ago.

Scientists considerthat the Moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, shortly after the solar system itself, when an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth and broke off a piece of our planet.

Similar to the Earth, the Moon's mantle contained molten pockets of magma that flowed through fresh fissures, causing a series of volcanic eruptions.

New data from Chang'e-4 shows a weakening of the volcanic process: the layers of rock are thinning closer to the surface of the moon, indicating a decrease in lava flow during later eruptions. This suggests that the moon has cooled over time and lost energy, Feng noted.

The Moon's volcanic activity probably ceased about 1 billion years ago, although there is some evidence for more recent activity. Despite the fact that the satellite is called "geologically dead", there may still be hidden magma under the lunar surface.

The Chang'e-4 lunar mission has not yet been completed, which means that it will continue its work to identify hidden geological structures on the far side of the moon. There may be many more interesting discoveries ahead that shed light on the history of the formation of our satellite.