Abundant evidence of iron and titanium oxides beneath the Moon's surface has been detected by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first satellite of the “Vision for Space Exploration,” a NASA program whose ultimate goal is to send astronauts to the Moon and establish permanent bases on its surface. and the achievement of the first manned flight to Mars.
LRO and metal
The LRO results are a small step toward better understanding how the moon formed, as observations show how iron and titanium oxides They are distributed beneath the northern hemisphere of the Moon.
The new research is based on a device called miniature radio frequency instrument (Mini-RF), a radar probe designed to map lunar geology, search for water ice, and test communications technologies.
The instrument scoured the terrain in the moon's northern hemisphere in search of an electrical property called the dielectric constant. This constant is a number that compares the ability of a material to transmit electric fields with that of the vacuum of space.
Electric field transmission is useful for finding ice in the shadows of craters, where it is protected from the heat of the sun. But it can also identify areas with more metals, such as iron and titanium oxides.
And the scientists noticed that the dielectric constant increased with the size of the crater, but only up to a point. The team's theory was that the top few hundred or meters of the moon's surface have few of these oxides, but a richer source of metal lies lower down. Then, As meteorites collide with the lunar surface and scrape away the upper layers, metals are exposed. That kind of pattern would also explain the low levels of metals in the lunar highlands and the higher abundances in the darker, lower plains closer to the moon's subsurface.
The results are even more intriguing in light of a puzzling phenomenon reported in 2019 by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission on the Moon. Gravity measurements of the Moon suggest that there is a large amount of dense material lying tens to hundreds of kilometers beneath the moon's massive South Pole-Aitken basin. The GRAIL results, along with the new LRO finding, suggest that metals may be more concentrated in certain regions of the moon.
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The news
There is much more metal on the Moon than we thought
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.