Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram rover and the origin of early lunar crustal rocks: Results for the Apollo 17 station 7 boulder

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Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander touched down on 23 August 2023. It released a rover called Pragyan, which collected data ranging from temperature to seismological measurements over 10 days.

Pragyan also studied the chemical composition of the regolith: the fine material that covers much of the lunar surface. The rover stopped 23 times and deployed an instrument called an alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS).

The ground truth is always good to get, and so we expected to be there, though it is a bit of what we expected.

Comment on “The Formation of the Moon” by McGetchin, T. R., Settle, P. G., and Camon, J. W.”

The best way to establish the origin of the Moon is to assume that the newly formed Earth was hit by a large impactor, known as Theia, and blasted into the air. The scattered material swiftly accreted to form the Moon. The lunar rocks have the same amount of isotope composition as on Earth.

They found elevated levels of magnesium in the samples, compared to calcium. It suggests that deeper mafic material has been put into the regolith.

There is no data to support that idea, and it seems to be dominated by a mineral called pyroxene. It will probably take samples to be brought back to Earth.

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Earth Calorimetry of Chandrayaan-2 Pragyaan and Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter: Implications for Lunar Petrology

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Source: Chandrayaan-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at lunar high latitude

Global mapping of lunar refractory elements: multivariate regression vs. machine learning. Chandracopter-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at lunar high latitude

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Pillai is a co-author with N. S. Chandracopter-2 large area soft X-ray analyser (CLASS) is used for calibration and first results. This year, Iscar 363, 114436.

Source: Chandrayaan-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at lunar high latitude

Statistical properties of breccia 67015: a diopside-bearing troctolitic anorthosite

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