With all the excitement around that is fast becoming like a traffic jam in Mars’ orbit, you may have forgotten about the cool things going on on the Moon.
China’s Chang’e 4-lander and Yutu 2-rover went into sleep mode during the approximately 14-day lunar night, during which the radioisotope heater units kept them warm by as low as 190 ° C (minus 310 ° F ). When Yutu 2 wakes up on February 6, he quickly comes across an unusual rock protruding from the surrounding lunar landscape.
The rock – which the Yutu 2 team decided to refer to as a ‘milestone’, rather than the much more dramatic ‘monolith’ we had all hoped for – was captured by the China National Space Administration (CNSA). justifies its curiosity and a closer approach.
The next day they looked closer and gave clues as to what could form the strange ‘stalagmite’ on the Moon.
The shard-like shape indicates that the rock is geologically young, as it is not worn and rounded, just as you would find rounded stones on a beach.
“It looks like it has a shard-like shape and sticks out of the ground. It’s definitely unusual,” NASA’s postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dan Moriarty, told Space.com.
“Repeated impacts, thermal cycling stresses and other forms of weathering on the lunar surface will tend to break down rocks into more or less ‘spherical’ shapes, given enough time.”
He suggests that the rock was probably ejected by an impact, probably from a nearby crater.
The team plans to use the Rover’s visible and near-infrared image spectrometer equipment to further analyze the rock. The instrument detects light scattered from the rock to analyze its composition.
The instrument was used to analyze the ‘yellowish’ substance found on the lunar surface in 2019. The substance appears to be similar to samples taken by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, which was also described as ‘dark’. , broken fragments of minerals cemented together and black, shiny glass ”. Analysis showed that it was probably rock that fused together during an impact event.