It has been a year since India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 mission achieved a groundbreaking milestone by landing a rover on the moon’s southern pole. This achievement marked India as the first country to explore this uncharted lunar region.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission has been instrumental in providing valuable data to ISRO scientists, offering new insights into the less-explored surface of the moon. Recent findings from the mission suggest that a vast ocean of molten magma might have once existed beneath the moon’s surface. These revelations were detailed in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.
According to the new data, there may have been a significant amount of hot, molten rock, or magma, beneath the lunar surface. This discovery could lead to new areas of study and help identify safe landing sites for future missions. The researchers propose that this magma may have cooled to form the moon’s surface approximately 4.2 billion years ago.
#ISRO is set to reveal the thousands of images captured by the Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover on #Chandrayaan3‘s landing anniversary, i.e. tomorrow!! 📸 🌖
Here’s a sneak peek at some of those images:
[1/3] Images taken by Pragyan’s NavCam: 👇
(Read alt text for details) pic.twitter.com/8wlbaLwzSX— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) August 22, 2024
The Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad has shared these insights a year after Chandrayaan-3’s historic landing. The mission’s rover, Pragyan rover, traveled 103 meters across the lunar surface and conducted 23 on-site analyses to examine the composition of lunar soil (regolith).
The data reveals a mixture of magnesium and olivine compounds, suggesting that these materials originated from a large impact crater about 2,500 kilometers wide in the moon’s South Pole. This is consistent with similar findings from the northern hemisphere of the moon, indicating a shared mineral composition despite the geographical distance.
Magma oceans occur when a celestial body, such as a planet or moon, has a molten surface during its early formation. According to NASA, these magma oceans form during the creation of a terrestrial planet.
Scientists theorize that the moon was born from a collision between two protoplanets. The smaller of these, now known as the Moon, was so hot that its entire mantle was molten, creating what is known as a magma ocean.
If this theory holds true, the magma ocean would have existed from the moon’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago and persisted for tens of millions of years.
Chandrayaan-3 continues to provide crucial data, enhancing our understanding of the moon and paving the way for future space exploration.
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