Science. – Samples brought by China revise the lunar chronology – Publimetro México

Madrid, 17 (European Press)

Chinese researchers have updated their most frequently used chronology model to provide more accurate time scales for lunar and planetary research.

Lunar chronology models were built by correlating the radioactive ages of samples returned by the Apollo and Luna missions measured in the lab with crater distributions collected from those locations, according to a research paper recently published in Nature Astronomy, cited by Xinhua.

These models have been widely used to determine the absolute ages of different regions of the Moon, and have also been generalized to date the surfaces of rocky bodies in the inner Solar System.

However, there is a gap in the ages of the previous samples between three billion and one billion years ago, which occupies almost half of the moon’s history.

The Chang’e-5 probe brought basalt material from a small, radioactively dated mare region to the center of this roughly two-billion-year-old gap.

Based on the analysis of the crater size frequency distribution, researchers from the Institute of Space Information Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have updated the Newcome (1983) model and created the new lunar chronology model.

They found that the updated model corresponds to a combination of exponential decay and linear rate. Compared to the old chronology model, the new model gives ancient ages in most cases, with a maximum of about 200 million years.

The findings have important implications for the timing and impact of the history of the inner solar system.

In addition, the updated lunar chronology model is expected to improve the chronology models of rocky planets such as Mars and Mercury with great accuracy.