The Moon's farside shallow subsurface structure unveiled by Chang'E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32133404.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aay6898 and PMC identifier 7043921.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
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Abstract
On 3 January 2019, China's Chang'E-4 (CE-4) successfully landed on the eastern floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole-Aitken Basin, becoming the first spacecraft in history to land on the Moon's farside. Here, we report the observations made by the Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) onboard the Yutu-2 rover during the first two lunar days. We found a signal penetration at the CE-4 landing site that is much greater than that at the CE-3 site. The CE-4 LPR images provide clear information about the structure of the subsurface, which is primarily made of low-loss, highly porous, granular materials with embedded boulders of different sizes; the images also indicate that the top of the mare basal layer should be deeper than 40 m. These results represent the first high-resolution image of a lunar ejecta sequence ever produced and the first direct measurement of its thickness and internal architecture.