NEW DELHI: The landing site where India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched the surface of the Moon’s South Pole in 2023 is about 3.7 billion years old, according to Indian scientists.
Using high-resolution remote sensing datasets, a team of scientists, including from Isro’s Electro Optics Systems centre in Bengaluru, Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and Panjab University in Chandigarh, mapped the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, also known as ‘Shiv Shakti’ point (located at 69.37°S, 32.32°E).
On August 23, 2023, Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft carrying Vikram lander and Pragyan rover became the first to land near the lunar South Pole, making India the fourth nation after erstwhile USSR (now Russia), US and China to make a soft landing on the Moon.
“The geological map reveals the spatial distribution of three distinct terrain types within the landing area that includes high-relief rugged terrain and smooth plains and low-relief smooth plains,” said the team in a paper, published in Science Direct journal. “The crater size-frequency distribution based best-fit ages of these distinct geological units are estimated to be 3.7 Ga (billion years),” the study said.
“It dates back to the same era when the earliest microscopic life forms began emerging on Earth,” said scientists in an article published in Nature.
Offering new insights into the Moon’s history, the geological map of the landing site reveals that debris from the nearby Schomberger crater covers the area. Further analysis revealed the landscape is scattered with boulders, some of which exceed 5 metres in size. “Most of them originate from a fresh, 540-metre crater located 14 km south of the landing site,” the report said.
To the west side are smaller, centimetre-sized rock fragments, which likely came “from a nearby 10-metre-wide crater”, it said.
To ensure that the interpretations from data acquired by the instruments on board the lander and rover are well placed into the current understanding of the lunar geologic and evolutionary history, it is critical to have a geologic map of the landing area. Both the geologic map and chronology of the mapped geological units will augment the results from in situ (original site) measurements, eventually enhancing the scientific significance of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Moreover, the local area navigated by the rover hosts centimeter-sized rock fragments, particularly toward the west of the landing site, which is linked to excavation by a 10 m diameter crater (western crater). These results provide valuable context for the interpretation of Chandrayaan-3 mission data and contribute to understanding of the geological history of the Moon’s southern high-latitude region.