The Surface of the Moon is a Galactic Time Capsule
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
The surface of the moon is a galactic time capsule:
You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but the moon is a time capsule.
Its surface has been completely exposed to vacuum for almost 4.5 billion years; meanwhile, it has been soaked by particles from the sun and beyond the solar system. Those particles remain, buried under the lunar surface, providing a detailed record of the history of our solar system and even our entire galaxy.
It's all right there. We just need to dig it up.
[...] Humans have collected lunar samples before: NASA's six landed Apollo missions in the 1960s and '70s each brought back souvenirs, and China's Chang'e 5 lander carried home the first fresh moon rocks in decades earlier this month.
But it's not enough to piece together the big-picture history scientists are looking for. According to a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv in November, we need more moon rock. We need to dig down at least a meter and collect samples from [as] many locations as possible, in order to reliably use the moon as a record-keeper of these solar and galactic events.
It's a good thing that NASA and other space agencies want to build long-term habitats on the moon - we'll need those facilities to start studying lunar dirt in more detail and unlock the history of our solar system and our passage through the galaxy.
Journal Reference:
The lunar surface as a recorder of astrophysical processes, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2019.0562)
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