Scientists have just discovered a new exotic element in the moon dust of the Apollo era

Science has traveled a long way since the launch of the Apollo 17 mission. In the past 50 years, researchers have developed advanced technologies and techniques that far exceed those available in 1972.

This progress is exactly what NASA hoped when the Apollo 17 astronauts – the last humans to set foot on the moon – returned to earth with more than 2,000 samples of lunar rock and dust. Some have been distant in the hope that one day, better equipped scientists could study the samples and make new discoveries.

And this is what a team of researchers led by James W. Dottin III, assistant professor of earth sciences, the environment and the planetary at Brown University, has just done so. Dottin and his colleagues analyzed the composition of the samples taken from the Taurus-Littrow valley of the Moon. The results, published last month in the journal JGR Planets, indicate that volcanic equipment in samples contain sulfur compounds which are clearly different from those found on our planet.

“Before that, we thought that the lunar coat had the same isotopic composition of sulfur as the earth,” Dottin said in a press release. “This is what I expected to see when analyzing these samples, but we have rather seen values ​​that are very different from everything we find on earth.”

A discovery of 50 years in manufacturing

After Apollo 17 astronauts landed in the Taurus-Lighttrow valley, they extracted a 2-foot sample long from the lunar surface using a hollow metal instrument called double drive tube. Once returned to earth, this sample and many others as they remained sealed inside their tubes under the protection of the NASA (Angsa) next generation samples analysis program.

In recent years, NASA has started to accept new research proposals to study Angsa samples. Dottin proposed to analyze sulfur isotopes using mass spectrometry of secondary ions, a high precision technique that was not available when the samples were returned to Earth.

Researchers can use this technique to measure the reports of different isotopes in a sample. These ratios serve as a distinctive imprint which points towards the origin of the sample. Thus, two samples with the same isotopic fingerprint probably came from the same source.

Previous research has shown that the isotopes of oxygen in lunar samples are almost identical between the rocks of the moon and the earth, so Dottin assumed that the same thing would be true for the sulfur isotopes. His results tell a very different story.

Two distinct isotopic fingerprints

Dottin and his colleagues specifically analyzed parts of the training tube sample which seemed to be a volcanic rock of the coat of the Moon. Their analysis revealed that the volcanic equipment of the sample contained sulfur compounds which are very weak in sulfur-33, an isotope of stable radioactive sulfur. This is very different from the isotopes of sulfur found on earth.

“My first thought was:” Saint-Shmolies, it cannot be fair, “said Dottin. “So we returned to make sure that we did everything correctly and we did. They are only very surprising results.”

According to the researchers, the results suggest that sulfur has formed in chemical reactions from the start of the history of the moon, or that it follows from its training. Experts largely believe that the moon is made of debris ejected by a collision between the earth and a Mars size object called Theia. Researchers may have found traces of the signing of Theia’s sulfur in the coat of the moon.

Dottin hopes that as researchers analyze the isotopes of sulfur other planets like Mars, they can start to solve this mystery. Isotopic analysis has already provided key information on how Earth and its only natural satellite have become, and this approach will continue to help scientists untangle the history of our solar system.