2023-05-18 16:42:28
(By Juan Magaña and Angie Barr, UCEN Academics Coquimbo region)
The Moon, our natural satellite, is a product of the formation of the solar system and the hypotheses of its creation are still under investigation. The Moon is at a distance of 384,400 km from Earth, and has a mass of 7.349×10^22 kg, and its gravity is so small that a human appears to take a floating step when walking on it. Its influence on our planet is such that it causes the tides in our oceans. The Moon has called the attention of our humanity for centuries, for example the Nahuatl culture, originally from Mexico, has a legend about its creation in the relationship of the god Quetzalcoatl and a rabbit that was found on his pilgrimage.
In the last century, the National Administration for Aeronautics and Space (NASA for its acronym in English, of the United States of America) began lunar exploration with the Apollo program. The peak moment was with the Apollo 11 mission when on 21 July 1969 for the first time a human being took his first steps on it, and Neil Armstrong narrated: “this small step for man is a great leap for humanity”.
In the last decade, the People’s Republic of China has increased its interest and efforts to explore the cosmos, particularly Mars and the Moon. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has designed a space program for the systematic exploration of the Moon called Chang’e in honor of the Goddess of the Moon in this culture. On 11/23/ In 2020, this country launched a space probe within the framework of the Chang’e-5 mission with the aim of analyzing the lunar composition. Among its scientific objectives was collecting samples of lunar soil and thus providing clues about its formation. Said probe landed on the moon in the so-called “Sea of Procellarum”, a crater on the Moon, and collected a sample of 1.73 kilograms of lunar soil.
The results of this mission have been published in recent days, confirming the existence of a mineral called ULM-1 whose dimensions are 160×109×73 micrometers (for comparison, the average diameter of a human hair ranges from 60 to 160 micrometers). ). The technique used to determine the composition of the collected material has been spectroscopy, which determined that the lunar soil sample contains Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Magnesium, among other chemical elements, a composition very similar to that of some terrestrial volcanic rocks. In addition, the spectral chemical analysis confirmed that 6.6% of the sample is made up of ammonium molecules and 41.7% of H20, that is, water, which should not be interpreted as the presence of liquid water.
This result has important implications for research both on the origin of the Moon and its chemical composition, but also on the early days of our solar system. Undoubtedly, this discovery by the CNSA will provide ideas to build better models of the formation of our planets and their natural satellites (or moons) as well as of our solar system, but it will also contribute to the understanding of how other planets (called exoplanets) and their exomoons orbiting other stars similar to our Sun. Great discoveries are coming and therefore a better understanding of the formation of our solar system dominated by the Sun, and our home, Earth.
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#discovery #water #molecules #lunar #soil