A new way to explore the moon through its dust particles

Little West

Researchers from the University of Chicago were able to develop a new technique for analyzing moon rocks using nanoparticles from moon dust not more than the diameter of a human hair.

This innovative method, called "tomography" of the atom, enables the analysis of the components of very small samples of an atom, and thus preserves the samples of moon rocks that were previously brought to Earth.

Precious rocks
The quantities of lunar rocks on the ground are limited (about 382 kg), most of which were brought in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century during the missions of Apollo, along with small quantities of about 300 grams brought by the Soviet "Luna" vehicles in the mid-seventies, and about 200 kg was found In more than 370 meteorites fell to the ground.

During the past decades, the need to use samples of these rocks in scientific research has increased, exposing quantities of them to damage, so researchers are seeking to develop new technologies that enable the use of the least possible quantities of these precious rocks to extract as much information and conclusions as possible.

"Fifty years ago, no one expected a person to ever analyze a sample of this (new) technique, and only a fraction of a single grain (of moon dust) was used," says geologist physicist Philip Heck of the University of Chicago.

And the supervisor of the new study, published in the journal "Meteoretics and Plantari Science" in late January, added that "thousands of these pills could be on an astronaut glove, which is a sufficient amount of material to conduct a large study."

It is astonishing to think that something very small may contain a lot of information, let alone access to this rich source of this knowledge in one way or another.

Atomic tomography
The technique of "tomography" of the atom is a promising technique to access this knowledge with very high accuracy, which enables it to photograph a small sample of the material atom atom, which provides the researchers with a three-dimensional analysis of the source.

To analyze a grain of moon dust using this technique, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, Junica Greer prepared a needle-shaped sample consisting of only a few hundred atoms, then the research team used lasers to "expel" the atoms from the needle one by one, and watch every atom flying and colliding with a revealing plate .

Scientists have noted that atoms of some elements of the sample are released at different rates. For example, iron takes longer to reach the detector plate compared to hydrogen, because it is a heavier element, which allowed them to analyze the chemical composition of the sample.

The authors say that this is the first time that we can see both types of atoms and their exact locations in a small grain of lunar soil, and better yet they used a few materials from the lunar dust, that is, the original sample from which the dust was taken is still intact Great and available for future research.

Watch a video of the sample prepared by the researcher Janika Ghurair in the form of a needle consisting of a few hundred atoms.

Results and futures
The results convinced NASA to fund three years of study on lunar dust using "tomography" of the corn, to estimate the quantities of water and the level of weathering on the terrestrial dependency, where scientific studies had recently concluded that the moon maintains large reserves of water in the deep soil layer And finding evidence of this in soil samples that scientists have in their hands will be an amazing discovery.

Unlike our planet, the moon does not have an atmosphere to protect it, so it is a harsh environment due to the solar wind hitting its surface with high-energy charged particles, and the moon's soil may have changed profoundly because of this weathering, and it is possible that what lies inside the moon does not match its outer surface.

So by understanding how the surface changes, the authors of the new study hope that they can somehow reverse the direction of the clock and try to discover how the lunar soil was in the distant past, and as Ghurair says, "These little grain of moon dust preserves millions of years of history."