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The Chinese Chang-e-4 landed where no spacecraft had landed before: on the far side of the moon. "This is a historic milestone in the international scientific exploration of the Moon, which opens for the first time to" Luna Incognita "on the hidden side of the satellite. surface exploration, "said James Head, a scientist at Brown University, Rhode Island.
The mission could answer fundamental questions about the formation of the moon, its evolution, and the history of the solar system. He will also perform the first radio astronomy experiments on his hidden side, realizing a very long dream of scientists and exploring if the vegetation could develop there.
The tide links the moon to the Earth, which means it works exactly once every time our planet circulates, always keeping the same hemisphere facing the Earth. Although the dark side can never be seen from the Earth, it is illuminated by the sun and presents the same phases as the side we see.
On January 3, the Chang-e-4 landing is the second and the first on the occult side of China. On the visible side of the Moon, the face of "moon man" is very visible because it is composed of dark areas that stand out on a fragile lunar ground. These dark areas formed when ancient asteroids touched its surface, causing lava explosions that darkened the facade and flattened it, thus erasing the earlier signs of impact.
But when ancient asteroids hit the dark side of the moon, there was no lava flow. The impacts simply left a surface marked by holes with craters. This has made the hidden side much thinner, much older and much craterier.
Some astronomers suspect that the dichotomy is due to the fact that the visible crust is much thinner. This would facilitate the release of magma on the visible side, said Briony Horgan, a scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. But the reason why the thickness of the crust varies so much remains a mystery. Chang & # 39; e-4 can offer some tips to solve the problem. The origin of the solar system was initially violent. Asteroids and comets bombed rocky planets and left craters. On Earth and other rocky worlds, volcanoes have eliminated these craters.
The hidden side of the Moon has preserved the original story of its youth, especially the number of times ancient objects collided with its surface. Astronomers have long dreamed of building a radio telescope on the hidden side of the moon, because the one on the visible side would reveal the many noises emanating from the Earth, such as mobile phones, TV channels and cars. "We use the wavelengths of radio waves to study everything from black holes closest to distant galaxies, so a hidden radio observatory would be a huge badet for astronomy," Horgan said.
A future lunar mission would improve the study of phenomena such as the primordial clouds of hydrogen gathered in the first stars of the universe. "We could hear a distant echo of the Big Bang and see the universe in a state prior to the formation of the first stars," said Heino Falcke, radio astronomer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Falcke pointed to the famous cosmic heat map of the universe as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, also known as microwave cosmic background radiation. "It was a baby picture," he said, but it would be possible to "see a movie about the evolution of the young universe, from the child who crawls to puberty" ,
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