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Oct 20, 2021
The Chang’e-5 lunar samples are the youngest to be directly dated
According to three scientific papers accepted for publication in the Nature journal, the Chang’e-5 lunar samples are the youngest to be directly dated. The analysis shows that the samples are 2.03 billion years old.
Chang’e-5 reveals the youngest lunar samples to be directly dated
The research suggests that the Moon’s interior was still evolving at around 2 billion years ago, with volcanic activity extending by around 800–900 million years more than previously thought.
Nature article / Published: 19 October 2021
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A dry lunar mantle reservoir for young mare basalts of Chang’E-5
Abstract
The distribution of water in the Moon’s interior carries implications for the origin of the Moon, the crystallisation of the lunar magma ocean, and the duration of lunar volcanism. The Chang’E-5 (CE5) mission returned the youngest mare basalt samples, dated at 2.0 billion years ago (Ga), from the northwestern Procellarum KREEP Terrane (PKT), providing a probe into the spatiotemporal evolution of lunar water. Here we report the water abundances and hydrogen isotope compositions of apatite and ilmenite-hosted melt inclusions from CE5 basalts. We derive a maximum water abundance of 283 ± 22 μg.g-1 and a δD value of -330 ± 190‰ for the parent magma. Accounting for a low degree partial melting of the depleted mantle followed by extensive magma fractional crystallisation, we estimate a maximum mantle water abundance of 1-5 μg.g-1, suggesting that the Moon’s youngest volcanism was not driven by abundant water in its mantle source. Such modest water contents for the CE5 basalt mantle source region is at the low end of the range estimated from mare basalts that erupted from ca. 4.0-2.8 Ga5,6, suggesting that the mantle source of CE5 basalts had become dehydrated by 2.0 Ga through previous melt extraction from the PKT mantle during prolonged volcanic activity.
Autors: Sen Hu, Huicun He, Jianglong Ji, Yangting Lin, Hejiu Hui, Mahesh Anand, Romain Tartèse, Yihong Yan, Jialong Hao, Ruiying Li, Lixin Gu, Qian Guo, Huaiyu He & Ziyuan Ouyang.
Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04107-9
Related article:
Chang’e-5 lunar samples extracted from the capsule
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2020/12/change-5-lunar-samples-extracted-from.html
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Image, Video, Text, Credits: CNSA/China Media Group(CMG)/China Central Television (CCTV)/SciNews/Nature/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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