view more
The Moon has been bathed in solar wind for billions of years, but the two hemispheres are struck by solar wind of different speeds and energies.
Now, research based on China’s Chang’e-6 samples reveals that Earth’s magnetosphere has shaped this difference. The study was published in Nature Geoscience.
The solar wind, a continuous stream of high-speed charged particles from the Sun, bombards the Moon’s surface directly. The lunar regolith has preserved a record of this bombardment, serving as a natural archive of solar-wind-derived volatiles, including the noble gases (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe). These chemically inert elements are highly reliable tracers of solar-wind implantation and provide valuable clues to this process.
Before this study, the lack of far-side samples prevented direct experiments on systematic differences in solar-wind implantation between the two hemispheres.
