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\n The Chang’e 6 capsule landed in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
CCTV Screenshot by NPR<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n CCTV Screenshot by NPR<\/p>\n
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A Chinese probe has returned to earth to Earth carrying the first samples ever taken from the far side of the moon. Chinese state television broadcast images Tuesday of the capsule holding the samples, as it floated down under parachute onto the grassy steppe of Inner Mongolia.<\/p>\n
Scientists say the rocks inside the little space capsule could open a new window into how our nearest neighbor formed.<\/p>\n
Chang\u2019e 6, which landed on the far side in early June, wouldn\u2019t be the first space mission to send home moon rocks that rewrote textbooks. Samples taken by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 upended what was then the prevailing theory about how the moon came to be.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\nPrior to Apollo, researchers had thought that it formed when a bunch of asteroids near Earth gradually glommed together. But the minerals in the moon rocks that the astronauts brought back suggested a much more violent origin story, according to Richard Carlson, director emeritus of the Earth and Planets Laboratory at Carnegie Science in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe wisdom now is that something the size of Mars, for example, hit the Earth and spalled off enough material to put it into orbit and form the moon,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In other words, the giant ball of molten magma that was ripped from the Earth by this collision eventually cooled into the orb we see in the sky.<\/p>\n
The theory is widely accepted today, but the evidence remains somewhat limited. That\u2019s because the Apollo missions (as well as the Soviet Union\u2019s robotic Luna missions) all landed on the near side of the moon \u2014 the one that always faces the Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about the geology of the Earth: If you only landed in North America, you\u2019d be missing a big part of the story, right?\u201d says Carlson.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s latest robotic probe, called Chang\u2019e 6, landed on the far side of the moon. That\u2019s a much more challenging task because the far side faces away from our planet and there\u2019s no direct way to communicate. Instead, Chang\u2019e 6 relied on a satellite orbiting the moon to relay its signal.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\nEarlier this month it used a drill and scoop to collect samples from a lava flow in an area known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Carlson, who is an emeritus researcher at Carnegie Science in Washington DC, says these new samples should confirm the Apollo-era origin story \u2014 that the entire moon was forged quickly around 4.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n
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If the Chang\u2019e 6 sample \u201cgives the same age as the stuff from Apollo\u2026 then the likelihood is that you\u2019re really looking at a global event,\u201d he says. If not, then the textbooks will have to be rewritten again.<\/p>\n
Jim Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University, says that the far side of the moon has many other mysteries as well. Unlike the near side, he says, the far side appears devoid of lava-flooded areas known as \u201cmaria\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s pretty clear that the far side and the near side have many, many differences,\u201d Head says. \u201cIt\u2019s a really critical issue. You can\u2019t understand the origin of a planet with one hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n
China and the U.S. are in competition with each other these days, including over the moon. Both nations say they want to send humans back to the lunar surface by sometime around the end of the decade.<\/p>\n
But China has also offered to share at least some of its new moon samples with American researchers, and NASA is allowing the U.S. scientists to submit proposals. Carlson is all for it:<\/p>\n
\u201cSomehow I suspect that international politics doesn\u2019t depend on our models for the origin of the moon,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
NPR’s Huo Jingnan contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Chang’e 6 capsule landed in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday. CCTV Screenshot by NPR hide caption toggle caption CCTV Screenshot by NPR A Chinese probe has… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":784620,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-npr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=784619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/784620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=784619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=784619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=784619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}