A rover investigating a previously unexplored area on the moon has found more evidence to support the theory that the lunar surface was once covered with an ocean of magma. After India's Chandrayaan-3 mission brought the Vikram lander to the moon's south pole a year ago, the Pragyaan rover spent 10 days collecting samples while traveling about 300 feet, the BBC reports. According to a study published in the journal Nature, its measurements from 23 sites found that the lunar terrain in the region is "fairly uniform and primarily composed of ferroan anorthosite," or molten rock—a lighter mineral that scientists believe floated to the surface and formed the moon's crust when the moon cooled a billion years ago.
Moon missions from other countries have found similar evidence to support the Lunar Magma Ocean theory, known as LMO, at sites closer to the moon's equator. According to the theory, the moon was covered in magma for millions of years after it formed around 4.4 billion years ago from debris created by a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet. The moon, much closer to Earth at the time than it is now, "would have looked like a hot reddish ball," lead author Santosh Vadawale tells the Washington Post.
The Post describes the moon—which lacks plate tectonics, meaning it still has the same surface as billions of years ago—as "a Rosetta Stone for the processes that formed the inner solar system." Planetary scientist Bethany Ehlman says understanding the processes is "particularly important as we now see rocky exoplanets around other stars and try to understand if any of them are Earth-like worlds."
- The rover also detected magnesium, the BBC reports. Researchers believe the mineral was "excavated" from deep inside the moon when an asteroid smashed into the polar region around 4 billion years ago, creating the enormous South Pole–Aitken basin, which has a diameter of 1,600 miles.
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