A European experiment aboard China’s Chang’e 6 mission has detected previously undetected charged particles on the lunar surface, cataloging them to allow astronomers to better examine the chemical composition of the lunar regolith.
These particles, which are essentially gases excited by sunlight, were detected at the landing site Chang’e-6 spacecraft in the southern pocket of Apollo Crater, which lies in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon. The first was an ion detector European Space Agency instrument for landing on the moon.
“It was the first ESA activity on the surface Moona world first scientifically and the first lunar collaboration with China,” said Neil Melville, ESA’s technical officer for the experiment. declaration. “We have accumulated a quantity and quality of data far beyond our expectations.”
While Earth thanks to its protection from solar storms magnetic field, which repels and captures charged particles from the Sun, the Moon lacks its own magnetic field. Thus, the gases in its vanishingly thin atmosphere—helium, ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide, among a handful of others—are easily ionized by sunlight and “captured” by the flowing plasma. These charged particles carry information about the chemical composition of the lunar regolith from which the gases originate through various processes occurring on the surface, including the impact of small asteroids.
Related: Watch the landing of China’s Chang’e 6 probe on the far side of the moon in dramatic video
In 2012 a NASA lunar mission called ARTEMIS (acronym for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the moon’s Interaction with Sun and not to be confused with the modern lunar program of the Artemis agency) observed ion trapping billowing 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) above the lunar surface. All were positive ions, meaning they contained more protons than electrons. Negative ions are short-lived and don’t float far from the surface, so they were never detected before the Chang’e-6 experiment, scientists say.
Scientists have not yet come up with an estimate of how many negative ions are floating near the moon’s surface, a number that would have implications for moon-to-moon interactions. sunaccording to Swedish Institute for Space Physicswhich built an ion detector called Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface (NILS).
NILS began operating nearly five hours after the probe landed on the moon on June 1. During the two-day mission, it operated intermittently, powered by low voltage, communication failure and reboot, ESA said. The detector collected a total of three hours of data — three times as much as needed for the experiment to be considered a success.
“We alternated between short bursts of full power and long cooldown periods as the instrument warmed up,” Melville said in a statement. “The fact that it stayed within its thermal limits and was able to recover in extremely hot conditions is a testament to the quality of the work of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics.”
Outside of the NILS experiment, the Chang’e 6 mission drilled into the surface of the Moon and collected about 2,000 grams of material. Scientists say these samples, the first ever collected from the far side of the Moon, could offer new insights into the formation and evolution of the Moon and the Moon. Solar System.
Once the sample acquisition was complete, the robotic lander placed a wooden model the five-star red flag of China on the surface before liftoff and rendezvous with the waiting spacecraft in orbit.
As of Wednesday (June 12), the samples continue to orbit the moon in the Chang’e 6 reentry module, awaiting proper time start your journey back to Earth. The return capsule is scheduled to arrive on June 25 at Siziwang Banner in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.