Scientists studying the fine dust covering the Moon have identified a number of large rocks on the lunar surface that they believe may be covered in dust with a unique magnetization.
Moon Knight Gives Us Hope
The team used artificial intelligence to review approximately one million images of the lunar surface, all taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The AI found 130,000 images of rocks with interesting features, half of which were reviewed by researchers. Their research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
On the Moon – a rocky satellite devoid of wind and erosion – dust is not just an irritant like powder. The crushed rocks are still very small, like those that cause sneezes on our Earth, but the Moon’s dust is sharp and electrostatically charged. While examining images of boulders on the Moon, researchers hope to find superlative rocks that reveal new properties.
“We recognized a rock with characteristic dark areas in just one image,” said Ottaviano Rüsch, a researcher at the Westfälische Wilhelm Münster University, and lead author of the study, in a university release. “This stone is very different from the others, because it reflects less light back to the sun than other stones. We suspect this is caused by certain dust structures, such as the density and size of the dust grains.”
The team concluded that the rocks were thrown during the formation of the Reiner K crater. Apart from their photometric properties – that is, how the dusty rocks look compared to other Moon rocks – “these dust-covered rocks show no further differences from -other rocks,” the group wrote in the study.
“Normally, lunar dust is highly axial and reflects a lot of light back towards the illumination,” Marcel Hess, a researcher at TU Dortmund University and co-author of the study, said in the release. “However, when the dust is compacted, the overall brightness usually increases. This was not the case with the observed dust-covered rocks.”
So what exactly is going on with this dust? The team isn’t quite sure yet, but the Lunar Vertex mission may have answers. This solar pad is scheduled to explore more than 1.2 miles of the Reiner Gamma region, where it will sample some of the magnetic properties of the lunar surface. If the runway focuses on the dust’s photometric behavior, the team wrote, it might explain why the dust appears different from other lunar dust, which in turn could reveal details of the moon’s formation or impact history.
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2024-01-21 01:46:15
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