The Lantern Festival is coming, let’s learn some knowledge about the moon

Xinhua News Agency, Nanjing, February 14 (Reporter Wang Jueyin) "Lantern Festival" is the first full moon night of the Lunar New Year. Thousands of years after the ancients gazed at the Moon Palace from afar, my country's Chang'e 5 brought lunar soil samples back to Earth, revealing more mysteries of the Moon.

Popular science experts from the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have compiled an encyclopedia of the "earthy" taste of the moon, allowing you to increase your knowledge of the "earthy" taste of the moon while eating glutinous rice balls.

Why is the lunar “soil” specialty so precious?

Wang Kechao, director of science popularization at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that lunar soil is the rock on the surface of the moon, which carries a lot of important information about the formation and evolution of the moon. After 23 days of lunar exploration, Chang'e 5 brought back 1,731 grams of lunar soil samples from the Rumker Mountains in the northern part of the Moon's Ocean of Storms, a new area that human probes have never set foot on before.

The new samples provide fresh first-hand data for the study of lunar surface weathering, volcanic activity, geological background and evolution, which can greatly deepen human understanding of the origin and evolution of the moon.

What happened to the lunar "soil"?

Wang Kechao introduced that from 1969 to 1972, the United States successfully carried out several manned lunar missions, bringing back about 382 kilograms of precious lunar soil and lunar rock samples. The United States once donated 1 gram of lunar soil samples to China, and Chinese scientists used 0.5 grams of it for research. Ouyang Ziyuan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recalled that the Chinese research team published a total of 14 papers using this 0.5 gram sample.

Starting with a soybean-sized bit of lunar soil, China began its journey into the vast sea of ​​stars in the solar system. Today, we have brought back lunar soil from a completely new area for research by scientists in China and around the world. This is a milestone in China's space history and an important step for human exploration and understanding of the moon.

Using the lunar soil retrieved by Chang'e-5, Chinese scientists have conducted a series of studies. Scientists "aged" the basalt samples and pushed back the geological life of the moon to 800 to 900 million years; scientists estimated that the water content in the lunar mantle source area of ​​the samples was only 1 to 5 micrograms per gram, indicating that the lunar mantle is very "dry."

The lunar soil samples collected by Chang'e-5 have also greatly refreshed humanity's previous understanding of lunar volcanic activity: there may be multiple periods of volcanic activity in the landing area, and we may need a completely new theoretical framework to explain the secret of the moon's geological "longevity."

"Scientists are still deepening their research on lunar soil. With the development of science, people's understanding of the moon is no longer limited to myths and legends, but the mysterious lunar soil still contains many unsolved mysteries, waiting for humans to continue exploring. I believe that in the near future, these 'soil' specialties from the moon will surely help humans discover more mysteries about the universe." Wang Kechao said.

Editor-in-charge: Xue Tao

Source: Xinhuanet