The Mysteries of the Moon. Part 4

1972 marks the end of manned Moon exploration. The Apollo says its last goodbye to the lunar surface. The focus turns to the geological samples the astronauts collected.

Carl Allen said: “We brought back surprisingly nearly half a ton of Moon rocks over the six successful Apollo missions. We have a lot of lunar rocks and soil from six small areas on the Moon”.

One of the most unexpected finds is a pocket of orange soil amidst the Moon’s otherwise gray landscape. It contains the finest particles of any Moon sample. Almost forty years later, the significance of this orange soil remains a mystery. The spacecraft’s powerful camera scans the entire lunar surface and finally finds what they’re looking for, 40 more pockets of orange soil deposits. But what is this race substance? Dr. Alberto Saal is trying to answer that question. He obtains orange soil samples from the Apollo 17 mission, then use a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer to analyze its composition in incredible new detail. He determines that the soil has a strange chemical composition. But the spectrometer also finds a surprise—water.

Dr. Alberto Saal said: “We didn’t expect to see it, given that for forty years, people tried to measure them and they said there was no water. That water was not completely lost on the material that will form the proto-lunar disk that surrounded the Earth after the impact that aggregated to form the Moon”.

Scientists believe that the Giant Impact vaporizes Earth’s water, wrapping it in a warm mist. Temperatures cool. The vapor on Earth becomes water again. Because the Moon’s gravity is so much weaker than Earth’s, almost all of its water vapor vanishes into space. But some is preserves for billions of years, locked inside tiny fragments of volcanic rock. The mystery of the orange soil has finally been solved. Japan’s Kaguya is bringing Moon exploration to a whole new level, allowing scientists to study the Moon’s terrain like never before.



Take a look at the difference. This is a picture of the Moon’s surface taken by an American lunar explorer in 1994. This is Kaguya’s version. The previous images could only reveal craters around 1500 feet in diameter. Kaguya can identify pits as small as 30 feet, and render them in stunning 3-D. The orbiter’s terrain camera has two lenses, one looking forward, the other looking back. The film the same location from two slightly different angles. Combined, they bring the Moon to life. Kaguya is giving us breathtaking new views of an uncharted lunarscape, and allowing virtual exploration into the Moon’s most dramatic features… like the crater Tycho, whose signature streaks can be seen from Earth. As this actual satellite imagery reveals, the crater is 52 miles in diameter, with cliff faces higher than those of the Grand Canyon. Studying its unique features gives us new insight into how major impacts like this one have shaped the Earth. The prominent rim gives way to a series of terraces, a common feature of the Moon’s larger craters. Dozens of boulders pepper the terraces. On this enormous scale, they may look like grains of sand, but some of them are as large as buildings. The terraces slope to the floor of the crater, a vast plain of rock and dust scarred with deep cracks. In the canter of the crater a central peak soars to a height of 8,000 feet, more than six times higher than the Empire State Building. Kaguya’s incredible cameras have captured the most detailed terrain images of the Tycho crater ever. These images allow scientists to create a theory about the crater’s formation. One hundred million years ago, a large celestial body strikes the Moon’s surface, the equivalent of detonating millions of nuclear bombs. A massive shock wave sweeps across the Moon’s surface at blazing speed…and blasts away 20 trillion tons of pulverized rock and dust. Debris soars as far as 1,250 miles away. This creates Tycho’s unique starburst pattern. The meteor’s initial impact creates a huge basin, over two and a half miles deep. Then, the lunar surface begins to rebound from force of the collision. Land near the rim slumps into terraces. The floor of the crater continues to rise until the bedrock pierces the surface, creating the central peak. Lunar crater analysis gives scientists a better perspective on one of earth’s hidden battle scars. Hidden under Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in the Chicxulub crater. 112 miles across, it’s twice the size of the Tycho crater, but shares the same shape distinctive central peak. Scientists believe it’s the impact site of a 6-mile-long asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago. Researchers estimate that this colossal impact dislodges trillions of tons of rock and debris. Massive clouds of tiny dust particles billow up into the atmosphere, where they block out the sunlight. A significant cooling of the earth of the Earth follows, and may have led to the dinosaurs’ extinction. The more clues Kaguya’s cameras uncover on the surface of the Moon, the more we learn about our own planet, and its dramatic past. Groundbreaking discoveries out here may even hold the secrets to life on Earth.