NASA Research Says Moon May Be Much More Metallic

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LRO

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a NASA robotic spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon. Data collected by LRO have been described as essential for planning NASA’s future human and robotic missions to the Moon.
Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO was the first United States mission to the Moon in over ten years.
The first images from LRO were published on July 2, 2009, showing a region in the lunar highlandsAs of 2019, LRO has enough fuel to continue operations for at least seven more years, and NASA expects to continue utilizing LRO’s reconnaissance capabilities to identify sites for lunar landers well into the 2020s.

Substantial evidence points to the Moon as the product of a collision between a Mars-sized protoplanet and young Earth, forming from the gravitational collapse of the remaining cloud of debris. Consequently, the Moon’s bulk chemical composition closely resembles that of Earth.

In a new milestone in lunar exploration, NASA this week said that it’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft had found evidence that the Moon’s subsurface might have greater quantities of metals such as iron and titanium than thought before.
The metallic distribution was observed by the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument aboard the LRO.
Published on July 1 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the finding could aid in drawing a clearer connection between Earth and the Moon, the press release said.

In order to understand the origins of the Moon, scientists have for years explored the presence of metal deposits on the satellite comparative to Earth. As more data has become available over time, researchers have been able to further refine their hypotheses
The new discovery by NASA is expected to challenge some of their past beliefs.
Out on a mission to look for ice in polar lunar craters, the LRO’s Mini-RF instrument was measuring an electrical property within lunar soil in crater floors in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. The property, known as the dielectric constant, is the ratio of the electric permeability of a material to the electric permeability of a vacuum.
To their surprise, the Mini-RF team observed that the level of this property increased as they surveyed larger craters, and kept rising in crater sizes up to 5 km in diameter. Beyond that size, the value of the dielectric constant leveled off. Essam Heggy, the lead author of the published paper and coinvestigator of the Mini-RF experiments, called the observation “a surprising relationship that we had no reason to believe would exist.”

Out on a mission to look for ice in polar lunar craters, the LRO’s Mini-RF instrument was measuring an electrical property within lunar soil in crater floors in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.
To their surprise, the Mini-RF team observed that the level of this property increased as they surveyed larger craters.

According to the NASA press release, the findings raise the possibility that the dielectric constant increased in larger craters because the meteors that created them dug up dust containing iron and titanium oxides from beneath the Moon’s surface.
Dielectric properties are directly linked to the concentration of these metal minerals

All craters on the moon are a result of meteorites colliding with the lunar surface. And since meteors that form larger craters are bound to dig deeper into the moon’s subsurface as well, the team reasoned that the bigger meteors may have automatically excavated iron and titanium oxides that lie below the surface.
This could have resulted in the increase in the dielectric constant of the dust in larger craters, as dielectric properties are directly linked to the concentration of metal minerals.

If true, this logic would imply that beyond a few meters of the Moon’s upper surface– which relatively has lower metal deposits– lie large unknown quantities of iron and titanium oxides.
The Mini-RF findings were backed by metal oxide maps from the LRO Wide-Angle Camera, Japan’s Kaguya mission and NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which showed that larger craters with their increased dielectric material were also richer in metals.
NASA has now undertaken further research to find whether the same relation between metal deposits and crater size holds true on the southern hemisphere of the Moon.