China's Moon Rover Discovers 'Sticky' Dust And Green 'Gel' On Far Side
China’s Yutu-2 over is the first to explore the far side of the Moon, and thanks to the fresh trove of data it relayed, it appears that the lunar soil in that region is a tad stickier and there’s an abundance of craters as well. Launched as part of the China National Space Administration’s Chang'e 4 mission back in 2018, it became the world’s first robotic lunar rover to soft-land on the mostly unexplored far side of the moon.
It also holds the honor of being the world’s longest-lived operational lunar rover. Plus, it was also the first to capture high-resolution images of the lunar ejecta sequence resulting from small particles striking the moon’s surface. More recently, the rover made waves after spotting what looked like a mystery hut, but later turned out to be just a peculiarly shaped rock. Now, the rover is back into the limelight with some more intriguing findings.
Related: Japan Aims To Put First Non-American On The Moon Within The Decade
A paper published in Science Robotics that was compiled by researchers across several institutions in China, Germany, and Canada using data sent by the rover suggests the far side of the Moon has a sticky surface riddled with craters of varied sizes. The team found that the wheels of the Yutu-2 rover had 46 percent of their surface covered in some sort of lumpy soil. The first-gen Yutu rover that was deployed as part of the CE-3 mission had an identical wheel configuration, but only about 2 percent of the wheel’s surface was covered in fine particles. And that too can be attributed to electrostatic surface adhesion. In the case of the Yutu-2 rover, its wheels had larger pieces of soil stuck to them. And before one starts imaging lunar solid clumping together due to water, the
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