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New computer modeling hints that some rocks in those landing zones came from far beneath the crust. <\/p>\n
Lifted from hundreds of miles down, they are from a part of the Moon<\/a> no one has sampled. That would put pieces of its deep interior within a short walk of a boot print.<\/p>\n The Moon\u2019s oldest scar<\/p>\n On the far side of the Moon, hidden from anyone on Earth, sits the largest and oldest impact crater we know of. <\/p>\n Scientists call it the South Pole-Aitken basin, a bruise more than 1,200 miles wide, gouged out around four billion years ago. Because the strike dug so deep, the far side has stayed quiet ever since. <\/p>\n The basin preserves a record of the Moon\u2019s infancy that the restless near side erased long ago. It is a time capsule from the early solar<\/a> system.<\/p>\n A blow that big should have punched through the crust and flung up rock from the lunar mantle. Reaching that buried rock has been a goal for decades.<\/p>\n Rebuilding the collision<\/p>\n To work out how the crater formed, a team rebuilt the collision inside a computer, replaying the giant impact at different speeds and angles until the simulated basin matched the real one. <\/p>\n Dr. Shigeru Wakita, a planetary scientist at Purdue University<\/a>, led that work. The winning scenario was no gentle, head-on hit. <\/p>\n Reproducing it took an object roughly 160 miles wide slamming in at a low angle, traveling from the Moon\u2019s north toward its south.<\/p>\n That direction is the twist. Earlier thinking assumed the impactor arrived heading north. <\/p>\n However, the basin\u2019s lopsided outline, an ellipse that narrows toward the south pole, fits a southward strike much better.<\/p>\n A lopsided iron core<\/p>\n The collision also exposed the nature of the object. A plain, uniform rock<\/a> could not carve the basin we see. <\/p>\n Only a layered body produced a matching basin, a heavy iron core sealed inside a rocky shell. <\/p>\n The object may have been a small protoplanet, a planet that never finished forming, or a large asteroid.<\/p>\n Hitting at a low angle, the body\u2019s outer rock sheared away while the dense core kept plowing forward, digging a long, tapered cavity<\/a> in its path.<\/p>\n When a single uniform rock was swapped in, the basin came out too round. <\/p>\n An earlier study<\/a> had argued that the strike came from the north. The new simulations put that idea to a physical test and challenged it.<\/p>\n Reading the gravity<\/p>\n Knowing how the rock flew is one thing, but finding where it landed is another. A companion study traced the buried debris through the Moon\u2019s gravity, using a pair of NASA orbiters. <\/p>\n The mission, called GRAIL, mapped the faint tugs in its pull from above. Dr. Gabriel Gowman of the University of Arizona<\/a> led the research. <\/p>\n Where buried rock is denser than its surroundings, it pulls a little harder on a passing spacecraft. <\/p>\n Those extra tugs map where heavy material hides underground. Gowman\u2019s team found a band of dense patches ringing the basin\u2019s rim, hidden in the rubble the impact threw out.<\/p>\n Their density fits buried rock from the mantle. Roughly 250 miles across, the ring runs through the south polar region.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe precise distribution of mantle material has been a big unknown,\u201d said Gowman.<\/p>\n Rocks within reach<\/p>\n Buried mantle rock is not helpful on its own. The picture changes because smaller, later impacts appear to have punched into those deposits long after the basin formed. <\/p>\n The impacts could have brought some of the deep material back to the surface where it could be lifted by hand. That carries the discovery to NASA\u2019s doorstep.<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s Artemis program aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole around 2028, and several sites fall inside or beside that ring of mantle<\/a>-rich debris.<\/p>\n Older models placed the deepest debris far from the proposed exploration zones, out of reach. <\/p>\n The new study reverses that picture, suggesting mantle rock piled as much as two miles thick in spots may lie scattered across ground the first crews could walk.<\/p>\n Where to look next<\/p>\n Before this work, the impactor\u2019s path and the spread of its deepest debris were open questions. <\/p>\n Now scientists have a physical model of the strike and a gravity map of where the deep rock settled, with reason to expect real samples within reach.<\/p>\n Gravity alone cannot prove what the dense rock is. It could be heavy mantle rock or leftover metal from the impactor\u2019s core. <\/p>\n A 2019 measurement<\/a> had already flagged a huge, buried mass under the basin, its origin still debated. <\/p>\n Only a returned sample would settle the question and pin down one of the Moon\u2019s oldest dates.<\/p>\n Futuristic Moon study<\/p>\n For the crews bound for the south pole, that could mean gathering rock from a layer of the Moon no human has touched, during humanity\u2019s first visits to the region.<\/p>\n The far side\u2019s oldest wound may prove its most generous, offering pieces of the deep interior to whoever lands in the right spot.<\/p>\n The study is published in Science Advances<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA is preparing to land astronauts near the Moon\u2019s south pole, a region no crewed mission has ever…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-521988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}