Unusual rock “milestone” found standing on the other side of the moon

With all the excitement surrounding what is quickly turning into a traffic jam in Mars orbit, you might have forgotten about the cool things happening on the Moon.

The Chinese Chang’e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover entered standby mode during the lunar night of about 14 days, during which time radioisotope heaters kept them warm at temperatures as low as minus 190. Celsius (minus 310 Fahrenheit). Waking up on February 6, Yutu 2 quickly came across an unusual boulder sticking out of the surrounding lunar landscape.

The boulder – which the Yutu 2 team decided to call a “milestone” rather than a much more dramatic “monolith” than we all hoped – jerked out of the ground, capturing the China National Space Administration (CNSA). curiosity and justifying a closer approach.

The next day they took a closer look, giving clues as to what could have formed the strange “stalagmite” on the moon.

The shard-like shape suggests that the rock is young, geologically speaking, as it hasn’t been worn down and rounded, much like you would find rounded stones on a beach.

“It appears to have a shard-like shape and protrudes from the ground. It’s really unusual,” Dan Moriarty, NASA postdoctoral fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.

“Repeated impacts, thermal cycle stresses, and other forms of weathering on the lunar surface would all tend to break rocks into more or less ‘spherical’ shapes, with sufficient time.

He suggests that the rock was probably thrown from an impact, probably from a nearby crater.

The team plans to use the rover’s visible and near infrared imaging spectrometer equipment to analyze the rock in more detail. The tool detects the light that is scattered on the rock, in order to analyze its composition.

The tool was used to analyze the ‘gel-like’ substance that was found on the surface of the Moon in 2019. The substance was found to be similar to samples taken by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, also described as “dark, broken mineral fragments stuck together and shiny black glass”. Analysis revealed that they were likely rocks that had melted together during an impact event.