China’s Chang’e-3 robotic Moon mission made a soft landing in late 2013, touching down in the northeast of Mare Imbrium, also called the Sea of Rains.
The Xinhua news agency reports that payloads on that “retired” lunar probe remain operational after more than 2,400 days on the near side of the Moon.
According to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration some of the scientific payloads carried by the Chang’e-3 lander are still operating.
Multilayered finding
In the meantime, Chinese researchers recently reported finding multilayered young lava flows in the Chang’e-3 landing zone. Results from the lunar penetrating radar onboard the Yutu-1 rover have been published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Lead author of the paper, Yuefeng Yuan of the Institute of Geophysics and Geomatics, China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, China, explains that three layers of thin young mare basalts underlying the lunar soil have been detected at Chang’e-3’s landing site. In previous studies, the region is thought to be formed by one layer of a thick lava flow.
Young lava flows
Lunar penetrating radar data was assessed showing that multilayered young mare basalts underlying the regolith exist, interpreted as three periods of thin Eratosthenian lava flows. The Eratosthenian period in the lunar geologic timescale runs from 3,200 million years ago to 1,100 million years ago.
The result infers that these young lava flows in the northern Mare Imbrium probably erupted intermittently from the same source, according to the research paper.
Zigzagging route
China’s Chang’e-3 Moon mission delivered the rover Yutu-1, or Jade Rabbit, and a stationary lander to the lunar surface on December 14, 2013. The touchdown marked the first robotic Moon landing since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.
The site that Yutu-1 investigated is a region not directly sampled before, far distant from the U.S. Apollo lunar landing sites.
Yutu-1 drove a total of 374 feet (114 meters) following a zigzagging route, before succumbing to technical glitches.
To access the research paper — “New Constraints on the Young Lava Flow Profile in the Northern Mare Imbrium” – go to:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020GL088938