What they saw “looked suspiciously like a caldera,” Dr. Louis, led a team that examined that high-resolution images of Compton-Belkovich. Jolliff, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University of St. The next revelations came after the arrival of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009. But even as a physicist, I saw that stand out and said, ‘OK, this is something worth further study.’” Lawrence, now a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. “It was one of these oddball places that just stood out like a sore thumb in terms of the thorium abundance,” said Dr. The energy of the gamma-rays, the highest energy form of light, corresponded to thorium, a radioactive element. In the late 1990s, David Lawrence, then a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was working on data collected by NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission and noticed a bright spot of gamma-rays shooting from this location on the moon’s far side. (It does not even have a name of its own the hyphenated designation is derived from two adjoining impact craters, Compton and Belkovich.) The region has nonetheless fascinated scientists for a couple of decades. The data from Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface - and proved ideal for investigating the oddity of Compton-Belkovich. The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. “Therefore, I quit my job in China, moved to the United States, and joined Planetary Science Institute.” “I realized that combining the lunar exploration data from different countries would deepen our understanding of lunar geology and make exciting findings,” Dr. Feng was working on a lunar exploration project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was able to tap into the expertise of a Chinese scientist, Jianqing Feng, who met Dr. But, luckily, they made some of their databases public.” “It would be really great if we could just have been working on this with the Chinese scientists the whole time. “That was a limitation, that we couldn’t just call up the engineers that had built the instrument in China and say, ‘Hey, how should we be interpreting this data?’” he said. Siegler could not work with scientists and engineers who collected the data. Because Congress currently prohibits direct collaboration between NASA and China and the research was financed by a NASA grant, Dr. Siegler and his colleagues analyzed data from microwave instruments on Chang’e-1, launched in 2007, and Chang’e-2, launched in 2010, two early Chinese spacecraft no longer in operation. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China’s space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data.įor this study, Dr. The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. “But then what’s interesting is, it’s a very Earth-like volcanic feature.” “I would say we’re putting the nail in the coffin of this really is a volcanic feature,” said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research. They point to a large slab of granite that solidified from magma in the geological plumbing beneath what is known as the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex. The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon’s far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft.

A dome in the Compton-Belkovich region of the moon, which researchers believe has volcanic origins.

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