First look by the Yutu-2 rover at the deep subsurface structure at the lunar farside

• Published in: Nature Communications
• Main Authors: Lai, Jialong, Xu, Yi, Bugiolacchi, Roberto, Meng, Xu, Xiao, Long, Xie, Minggang, Liu, Bin, Di, Kaichang, Zhang, Xiaoping, Zhou, Bin, Shen, Shaoxiang, Xu, Luyuan
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2020
• Subjects: General Physics and Astronomy; General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; General Chemistry; Aitken; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17262-w; http://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17262-w.pdf; http://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17262-w

Abstract The unequal distribution of volcanic products between the Earth-facing lunar side and the farside is the result of a complex thermal history. To help unravel the dichotomy, for the first time a lunar landing mission (Chang’e-4, CE-4) has targeted the Moon’s farside landing on the floor of Von Kármán crater (VK) inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA). We present the first deep subsurface stratigraphic structure based on data collected by the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) onboard the Yutu-2 rover during the initial nine months exploration phase. The radargram reveals several strata interfaces beneath the surveying path: buried ejecta is overlaid by at least four layers of distinct lava flows that probably occurred during the Imbrium Epoch, with thicknesses ranging from 12 m up to about 100 m, providing direct evidence of multiple lava-infilling events that occurred within the VK crater. The average loss tangent of mare basalts is estimated at 0.0040-0.0061.