Recent data collected by India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission This supports the theory that the Moon was covered by an ocean of magma in its distant past. The researchers arrived at this conclusion based on measurements taken by the Pragyan vehicle, which explored the lunar south pole after the Vikram module landed in August 2023. A study on the discovery was published in the journal Nature.
Lunar geology
The magma ocean model was first conceived after the return of samples from NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. But the Indian mission landed in a region farther south than any spacecraft before, Giving scientists a new perspective on the geology of the Moon. The Pragyan rover discovered that the lunar soil around the module is composed primarily of ferrous anorthosite, a type of white rock that has a remarkably uniform chemical composition.
The scientists observed that the chemical composition of the soil at the South Pole is intermediate between samples collected in two previous missions: Apollo 16, from the United States, and Luna 20, from the Soviet Union, both from 1972. The great similarity in the chemical compositions of all these samples, despite coming from very distant geographic locations on the Moon, This reinforces the idea that an ocean of magma covered the Moon early in its history.
The Moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, ejecting rocks that later coalesced to form our planet’s only satellite. The lunar magma ocean may have existed from its formation for tens or hundreds of millions of years afterward. The cooling and crystallization of this magma eventually resulted in the iron anorthosite rocks that make up the lunar crust.
