Data from India’s historic moon mission supports long-standing lunar theory

The historic Chandrayaan-3 mission, which made India the fourth country to land on the moon one year ago Friday, has uncovered new evidence that supports a theory about early lunar history...

When the mission landed in the moons southern high-latitude regions, near the lunar south pole, it deployed a small six-wheeled rover called Pragyan, which means wisdom in Sanskrit..

The presence of similar rocks in different parts of the moon lends additional support to the decades-old hypothesis that the moon was once covered by an ancient ocean of magma, the study authors said.. There are many theories about how the moon formed, but scientists mostly agree that about 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-size object or a series of objects crashed into Earth and launched enough molten debris into space to create the moon.. ..

Some rocks and minerals like ferroan anorthosite rose to the top to form the lunar crust and highlands, while other, denser magnesium-rich minerals like olivine sank deep below the surface into the mantle, said Noah Petro, NASA project scientist for both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Artemis III. Petro was not involved in the new study.. . While the lunar crust has an average thickness of about 31 miles (50 kilometers), the lunar mantle beneath it reaches about 838 miles (1,350 kilometers) deep.. ..

These new measurements in previously unexplored areas further enhanced the confidence in the (lunar magma ocean) hypothesis.. . Next, the Indian lunar exploration program wishes to explore permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles and return samples for a detailed analysis in laboratories on Earth, Vadawale said.. . While erosion and the movement of tectonic plates have erased evidence of how Earth formed, the moon remains largely unchanged apart from impact craters, Petro said.. ..

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