Lunar Composition Examined By X-Ray

whovian writes "Chandra, the x-ray observatory launched by NASA in 1999, is being used to study the composition of Earth's moon, perhaps putting an end to the age-old question, "Is the moon really made out of cheese?" 'Nuff said. The original press release is starting to get noticed here(1), here(2) and here(3). A neat idea, if you ask me, but will this postpone any manned lunar missions?"

Comments

postpone manned missions?!

[m00by]

good god man, they're not taking a huge honking X-ray of the moon, chandra uses the background X-ray radiation in the universe as it's "X-ray" and it focuses that into useful data. it's a passive x-ray, not an active scan :)

Disappointed?

[barakn]

You may have noticed the extremely low resolution of the images produced by Chandra. In fact, other craft have gotten much better pictures of elemental compositions of the lunar surface, especially common elements like titanium and iron. For instance, Galileo returned this and Clementine (some very high res images here) returned this iron map and this titanium map.

Chandra detected magnesium, silicon, aluminum, and oxygen, but its already known that the lunar highlands are composed mostly of anorthosite, a rock which contains all of those elements but magnesium (I would like to know why magnesium and not calcium was detected). This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. The most important information to come from these first observations is the discounting of the anomolous farside x-ray emissions.