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

Jialong Lai; Yi Xu; Roberto Bugiolacchi; Xu Meng; Long Xiao; Minggang Xie; Bin Liu; Kaichang Di; Xiaoping Zhang; Bin Zhou; Shaoxiang Shen; Luyuan Xu

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17262-w

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

Nat Commun. 2020 Jul 9;11(1):3426. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17262-w.

Authors

Jialong Lai^{1

2}, Yi Xu³, Roberto Bugiolacchi^{1

4}, Xu Meng^{1

5}, Long Xiao^{1

6}, Minggang Xie^{1

7}, Bin Liu⁸, Kaichang Di⁸, Xiaoping Zhang¹, Bin Zhou^{9

10}, Shaoxiang Shen^{9

10}, Luyuan Xu¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China.
² School of Science, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China. yixu@must.edu.mo.
⁴ University College London, Earth Sciences, London, UK.
⁵ School of Civil Engineering, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China.
⁶ Planetary Science Institute, School of Earth Sciences, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China.
⁷ College of Science, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin, China.
⁸ State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China.
⁹ Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Radiation and Detection Techonology, Chinese Academy of Sceience, Beijing, China.
¹⁰ Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China.

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.