Badania "Rusty Rock" - skały dostarczonej przez załogę Apollo 16 zdają się wskazywać , że Księżyc jest wewnętrznie suchy, co wskazuje na powstanie Srebrnego Globu w warunkach wysokiej temperatury podczas kosmicznej katastrofy.
Pordzewiała skała okazała się być bardzo sucha wewnątrz.
Close-up photo of metallic salts or 'rust' on surface of 66095 -- the lunar 'Rusty Rock'. Note the appearance of a crust under the colored salts. 10 x magnification. NASA S72-48424. Credit: NASA(...) The question of the moon's moistness matters because the amount of water and other volatile (easily evaporated) elements and compounds provide clues to the moon's history and how it was formed.
"It's been a big question whether the moon is wet or dry. It might seem like a trivial thing, but this is actually quite important," said James Day, a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the leading author of the study funded by the NASA Emerging Worlds program. "If the moon is dry—like we've thought for about the last 45 years, since the Apollo missions—it would be consistent with the formation of the moon in some sort of cataclysmic impact event that formed it," Day said.
The results in this paper suggest that when the moon formed it was "very, very, hot," Day said. "Essentially an ocean of magma."
Day and his coauthors believe it would have been so hot that any water, or other compounds and elements that are volatile under conditions on the moon, such as zinc, would have evaporated very early in the moon's history.
They arrived at this conclusion after analyzing fragments of the "Rusty Rock," a rock collected from the moon's surface during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. (...)
"It's the only rock from the moon that came back with what appeared to be rust on its outer surfaces," Day said.
The implications of the Rusty Rock have mystified scientists for a long time—water is one of the essential ingredients of rust, so where could that water have come from? Some speculated the water could have been terrestrial, but further tests showed the rock and the rust were lunar in origin.
The new chemical analyses Day and his team applied to the Rusty Rock revealed that the rock's composition is consistent with it coming from a very dry interior.
"It's a bit of a paradox," Day said. "It's a wet rock that comes from a very dry interior part of the moon."
Day found that the rust on the Rusty Rock is full of lighter isotopes of zinc, meaning it's probably the product of the zinc condensing on the moon's surface after evaporating during the sweltering period of the moon's formation.
https://phys.org/news/2017-08-analysis-rusty-lunar-moon-interior.html#mshttp://www.pulskosmosu.pl/2017/08/21/analiza-zardzewialej-skaly-ksiezycowej-wskazuje-na-suche-wnetrze-ksiezyca/o misji Apollo 16 w wątku:
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=800.msg104336#msg104336