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Professor Carsten Münker at the University of Cologne is among seven international researchers to receive samples of soil and rocks from the Chinese Chang’e-5 mission, which returned to Earth five years ago. He and his team are hoping to gain new insights into the age of the Moon and how the lunar mantle formed.
China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) has selected seven from a total of 24 international proposals to share in the samples of Moon rock from its Chang’e-5 mission. One of the recipients is Carsten Münker at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geology and Mineralogy. In April, he travelled to Beijing to pick up the samples and to Shanghai to take part in a public signing ceremony along with other principal investigators from research institutions from around the world. Münker’s project is a collaboration with visiting scientists from Chengdu Technical University in China.
China’s unmanned space mission for lunar exploration was launched on 23 November 2020. On 1 December 2020, the probe landed northeast of the volcanic massif Mons Rümker in Oceanus Procellarum, a vast mare of hardened lava on the western edge of the near side of the Moon. From there, it brought 1.731 grams of material from the lunar surface on 16 December 2020. Chang’e-5 was China’s first lunar sample return mission. The samples were the first Moon rocks brought to Earth in nearly fifty years, since the last Soviet Luna mission of 1976.
“Having access to such unique lunar samples will be a major step forward in better understanding the evolution and origin of the Moon,” Carsten Münker says. “For Cologne, the collaboration with the Chinese colleagues is a great opportunity to increase our visibility in planetary research.”
One of Münker’s areas of expertise is cosmochemistry and the early evolution of the Earth. Operating state-of-the-art clean labs and mass spectrometers at Cologne, this includes the study of trace element and isotope geochemistry of various extraterrestrial samples, including meteorites and samples brought to Earth from space missions. He and his team will apply their analytical expertise to the lunar rock samples, hoping that they will provide insights into how the lunar magma ocean, a layer of molten rock believed to have covered the Moon’s surface shortly after its formation, crystalized into the lunar mantle. The team also expects to gain better constraints on the age of the Moon.
Chinese researchers, often with international cooperation, have already analysed the samples to produce scores of findings and dozens of scientific papers. One surprising and puzzling discovery is that the material, retrieved from Mons Rümker, an inactive volcano within the Oceanus Procellarum, is only two billion years old, or about one billion years younger than any samples retrieved by the U.S. Apollo and Soviet Luna missions. This suggests lunar volcanoes were active more recently than previously thought. Further sample analyses by Chinese teams raised the question of what was driving the volcanism in the absence of water and hot radioactive elements to produce subsurface magma. The international scientists now getting samples are confident they might provide answers to this and other questions using sometimes unique analytical equipment and their expertise.
More samples are on the way. Last year, Chang’e-6 returned nearly 2.000 grams of lunar soil, and scientists are eager to see what it can reveal about the Moon’s history. China has already said it will hold a similar competition to study the samples from that mission. It brought back to Earth the first ever rock samples from the far side of the Moon, specifically the Moon’s most ancient basin.
Professor Dr Carsten Münker
Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Cologne
+49 221 470 3198
c.muenker@uni-koeln.de
https://imfess.uni-koeln.de/aktuelles/mondproben-in-koeln#c178205
https://www.science.org/content/article/huge-honor-china-reveals-foreign-scienti...
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