As per The New York Times, and undoubtedly elsewhere,
China's robotic Chang'e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon's far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover's instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath.
The Chang'e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, a team of Chinese and Italian researchers showed that the top layer of the lunar soil on that part of the moon is considerably thicker than some expected, about 130 feet of what scientists call regolith.
"It's a fine, dusty, sandy environment," said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of mathematics and physics at Rome Tre University who was one of the authors of the paper.
Based on what NASA astronauts observed during the Apollo moon landings, other scientists said they would have expected one-quarter as much soil.
"That's a lot of regolith," said David A. Kring, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who is not involved with the Chinese moon mission. That's food for thought.
Chang'e-4 landed just over a year ago inside Von Karman crater, a 110-mile-wide depression, and continues to explore a part of the moon that has not been seen up close before.
The radar technology aboard the rover is widely used on Earth to reveal buried structures, and it has been deployed on spacecraft that orbit Mars but it has rarely been used on the surface of other worlds.
Yutu-2's predecessor, which landed on the moon in 2013, carried an identical instrument. Three rovers scheduled to be launched to Mars in July, one by NASA, one by a collaboration between Russia and the European Space Agency and one by China, all have similar radar instruments.
Dr. Kring said he had worked on proposals to NASA for using ground-penetrating radar on future missions to the moon, both robotic and crewed. The Chinese mission's findings might show the technology's utility, especially to find ice deposits beneath the lunar surface that could help make possible extended stays on the moon by human crews.
[...] One surprise was that the researchers saw no signs of the radar bouncing off basalt - solidified lava - that would have pooled at the bottom of a crater as the rocks melted by a meteor impact cooled. Yutu-2's radar signals would have bounced off that rock if the rover had visited Von Karman crater soon after it formed.
[...] But the research also points to potential pitfalls of ground-penetrating radar data.
The Yutu instrument emits two frequencies of waves - a high-frequency band that Dr. Pettinelli and her colleagues analyzed and a low-frequency band that penetrates deeper but does not provide as much detail and which they ignored in this paper, because they consider it unreliable.
In a paper published in the journal Science in 2015, a different group of Chinese researchers described a complex geology of nine distinct layers below Mare Imbrium, a lava plain on the moon's near side where China's earlier mission, Chang'e-3, had landed. Those findings were based on the first Yutu rover's low-frequency radar data.
A few years ago, Dr. Pettinelli led a session at a scientific conference where Yan Su, a professor at China's National Astronomical Observatories, presented another analysis of the Chang'e-3 radar data. She said she did not say anything during the session, but later told Dr. Su that she had performed the analysis incorrectly. Further analysis led the two and their colleagues to conclude that the reflections that had been interpreted as geological features of the moon in the 2015 Science paper were distortions caused by the metallic body of the rover.
"Basically, it's a mess," Dr. Pettinelli said.
[...] "I would not say these missions are producing extraordinary science," [Dr Kring] said. "But they are demonstrating a newfound capability. And they are on the science side, filling in some details, providing some details we didn't have."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:12PM (3 children)
Where's the cheese?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:29PM
It's under the Pink Floyd records.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:34PM
The Nazis had the bunnies turn it all into mochi cheesebread.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:25AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RmT094XH9g [youtube.com]
start at 0:38
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:31PM
Can they dig it up?
Would they say they unearthed a sealed can of fish? Fish having no biological relation to any living organism on Earth.
Would it be incorrect to say "unearthed" ? Should they say "unmooned" instead?
I suppose being "unmooned" is the opposite of being "mooned".
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:37PM (2 children)
according to fossil fuel with a dash of atom splitting industry financed industry, everything is teached to be reduced to simple geometrical forms: circles, lines, triangles.
if the moon is not the source of simplicity but presents its self as a regular body, then a hidden variable supporting its regular existance is elsewhere to be found ...
much luck sailing the tidel oceans with solarwinds then?
i suppose we could argue if making the monthly periods longer or cheaper to deal with is gender neutral? or maybe worth of prison?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:07PM (1 child)
wat i mean is, that there are only two genders, so lets fight.
but on a side note, even a lobsided triangle can be made to look like a hollywood made circle moon with a.center.of mass wayyyy of circle center.
this would be awesome and would yield some crazy ass class action lawsuit staffed by circle center believers moonlighting as judges, dad,... err.. mom, lol
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:16PM
Sour Diesel? Purple Kush?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:35PM
is there a full moon today?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:40PM
I imagine the far side is more prone to asteroid impacts which would pulverize the existing landscape and add a fair amount of new material.
Or it is just the engine exhaust side of the space station so naturally the dust is deeper there.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 27 2020, @08:07PM (1 child)
peril, noun: serious and immediate danger.
Loss of accuracy in a report by some white labcoat on Earth years after gathering some data is not "serious and immediate danger".
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday February 29 2020, @02:25AM
"promise and peril" though is a not-uncommon idiom meaning "risk vs reward"
(Score: 5, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 27 2020, @08:30PM
I start the radar, only for moment and now the moment's gone
All the frequencies pass before my eyes a curiosity
Regolith in no wind
All they are is regolith in no wind
Same old song, look for ice in what is a waterless sea
All the data crumbles but we refuse to see
Regolith in no wind
All data are regolith in no wind
Now don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the surface (no sky)
It slips away, and all the lunar missions won't another atmosphere buy!
Regolith in no wind
All we are is regolith in no wind.....
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday February 27 2020, @08:31PM (4 children)
SpaceX to mature Starship Moon landing and orbital refueling tech with NASA’s help [teslarati.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:45PM (3 children)
What's so hard about that? All they have to do is deploy an extra large parachute.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:52PM (1 child)
Just slam into the dust, like a cushion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @10:18PM
Sure, as long as we're talking dust-bunny dust and not Newtonian fluid dust. Newtonian fluid dust would suck.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @01:06AM
Just hover for a while before landing. Solar system's largest leaf blower ever.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:50PM (3 children)
Your title got me all excited, thinking they finally found Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1 [wikipedia.org]. It would have explained everything that's happened in the last few years.
But it's just extra deep dirt.
Thanks for nothing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 27 2020, @10:55PM
Your title got me all excited
Yeah, me too. I thought they found lawyers
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 28 2020, @10:25AM (1 child)
You know if I was Elon Musk, I'd be so tempted to blow a few billion sending up a secret SpaceX mission to plant a monolith in that crater...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 28 2020, @01:38PM
That would be epic. And then when they open it up in front of the eyes of the world, it's a Tesla Powerwall battery. The free media would be worth billions.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @10:20AM
have sent coronavirus as warning.