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There are two distinct faces (or faces) of the Moon: one is largely marked by craters, the other is filled with open basins. Now, a new study suggests that an ancient celestial body is the cause of this mysterious "anomaly."
Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the study suggests that a "large body", perhaps an ancient planet or an asteroid, has crashed on the moon and gave it its distinctive features.
"Recent observations by remote sensing suggest that (1) the crust of the highlands of the hidden face consists of two layers: a primary anorthositic layer about 30 to 50 km thick and at the top of a rich layer more rich in mafic about 10 km thick, and (2) the near side has a large area of low Ca pyroxene, which has been interpreted as impacting the impact, "says the summary of the study. "These observations support the idea that lunar asymmetries close to the side of the hidden face could be the result of a giant impact."
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As part of the research, scientists put the measurements of NASA 's NASA (internal and indoor recovery laboratory) mission in 2012 into a computer and conducted 360 simulations of various collisions that could have caused different sides. In performing the simulations, they discovered that the most likely scenario would be a celestial body of about 480 km in diameter, slamming on the moon at a speed of about 14,000 km / hr.
"It would be the equivalent of an object a little smaller than the dwarf planet Ceres moving at a speed about four times slower than meteors, pebbles and grains of sand that burn like" shooting stars " in the atmosphere of the Earth, "the statement said. .
They also called an object of similar size, with a diameter of 450 km, at 15 000 km / hour as a potential candidate.
With the object that hit the moon at such a high rate, it would probably have caused whiplash and a spread of the material to the outside of the satellite.
"Our model can therefore explain this isotopic anomaly in the context of the giant impact scenario of the origin of the moon," the researchers wrote.
Steve Hauck, a professor of planetary geodynamics at Case Western Reserve University, said in a statement that the document was very "provocative".
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Hauck added that by understanding the different sides of the Moon and their origins, it became "a fundamental problem of lunar science, because several planets have hemispherical dichotomies, yet for the Moon we have many data to test models and hypotheses with, so the implications of the work could probably be broader than just the moon. "
Back to the moon
A deeper study of the Moon occupies a prominent place in our future. The Trump administration has asked the United States to return to the moon by 2024, with or without the help of NASA.
NASA's plans to return to the moon, including the creation of a lunar base, future rocket launches and the cost of these missions were leaked earlier this week. They were then confirmed by the government space agency.
As part of its plans to build a lunar base by 2028 and several launches, the documents disclosed by NASA indicate that the agency estimates it needs 4.7 to 8.2 billions of extra dollars a year to make these trips. The current budget of NASA is about 20 billion dollars a year.
The race to return to the Moon also attracts the attention of private companies including SpaceX's Elon Musk and Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos. Bezos, the richest man in the world, recently unveiled plans for his space exploration company to send a spacecraft to the moon, "this time to stay."
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James Rogers of Fox News contributed to this story.
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