Curious Gel-Like Substance Found By China’s Lunar Rover On Far Side Of The Moon

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover Yutu-2 discovered a strange discovery; a gel-like substance with an unusual color.
The discovery was made during lunar day 8 which started on July 25 (a lunar day is equal to 14 days on Earth).

Mission team members decided to focus their exploration on studying the strange material with color and luster different from the surrounding surface.

China’s Yutu 2 rover on the Moon. Image: CNSA via room.eu

Yutu-2 approached the crater with the strange substance and examined the area VNIS (Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer), an instrument used to detect scattered light or light reflected off of materials to reveal their makeup.

For now, no further information has been released by the Chang’e-4 mission scientists regarding this latest discovery and they haven’t shared an image of the weird material.

According to some sources, the substance could be a melt glass created from meteorites that strike the moon, similar to that which created the 180 kilometer-wide Von Kármán Crater where the Chang’e-4 mission landed.

China is the first country to land a rover on the far side of the moon and the area it was set to explore was the crash site of a big asteroid that hit the lunar surface. One of the tasks of the mission is to sample and study the composition of minerals on the moon’s surface.

“Where they’ve landed was once the site where a big asteroid crashed into the moon, buried itself deep inside and melted all that part of the moon, and presumably brought interior material up near the surface,” Auckland Astronomical Society president Grant Christie said earlier this year after the Chinese probe had landed.
The Yutu-2 rover is now awake for its ninth lunar day, which began on 25 August, and is probably conducting further scientific tests on its latest find.

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Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff