One of NASA’s big goals at the moment is a return to the Moon by humans and robots. We scientists are always asking for robots.

While there are certain fairly obvious places to go, like the probably water-rich South Aiken Basin, there are some science-rich places that we are also looking for. Ideally, geologists want to find places where mantle and other rocks that formed deep in the Moon have been brought up to the surface where they can be retrieved for study.

In a new paper in Nature Communications, data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been analyzed to look for the kinds of materials associated with the lunar interior, and those minerals have been found.

And conveniently, like the water we need, the science we want is located near the South Aiken Basin. This massive impact structure has areas of permanent shadow and areas where the material was lifted up through the impact. In the northwest corner of this region, there is a region with a weird composition that this new research finds is consistent with it being, and I quote the NASA release here, “’sludge’ that forms in the uppermost mantle at the very end of magma ocean crystallization.” Put another way, the liquid rock that once formed the Moon’s interior mantle cooled and crystallized over time, and this particular anomaly is likely the stuff that cooled off last.

And that is kind of cool. And now you know, now NASA knows, and now all of us wait until someone can go collect a sample to play with in a lab.

More Information

NASA Goddard press release

“Evidence for a Stratified Upper Mantle Preserved Within the South Pole-Aitken Basin,” D. P. Moriarty III et al., 2020 December 8, JGR Planets

“The search for lunar mantle rocks exposed on the surface of the Moon,” Daniel P. Moriarty III et al., 2021 August 3, Nature