A private moon lander challenges ideas about lunar volcanism Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now Menu All Topics Health Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology View All Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes View All Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment View All Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics View All Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology View All Magazine Menu All Stories Multimedia Reviews Puzzles Collections Educator Portal Century of Science Unsung characters Coronavirus Outbreak Newsletters Investors Lab About SN Explores Our Store SIGN IN Donate Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 SIGN IN Search Open search Close search Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 All Topics Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology Tech Computing Artificial Intelligence Chemistry Math Science & Society All Topics Health Humans Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Recent posts in Humans Animals When were dogs domesticated? 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NASA, Firefly Aerospace By Lisa Grossman 9 hours ago Share this:Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) The first measurements from a private spacecraft on the moon may reopen an old debate about why the moon’s Earth-facing side looks the way it does. Instruments aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander found that the underground heat at its landing site may not differ as much as scientists expected from heat measured from Apollo landing sites, researchers report in several talks March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in the Woodlands, Texas. The result could reshape thinking about how the moon’s familiar dark patches formed. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. Almost all the moon’s lava flows are concentrated on its nearside, in dark plains that give us the man in the moon. Scientists have long argued that a concentration of heat-producing chemical elements on the nearside helped support extensive volcanism there. So on March 2, 2025, Blue Ghost landed outside the heat-rich terrain in an impact basin called Mare Crisium, to see if it really was cooler there. “The idea was, if we go outside of that region, we can eliminate any internal bias and get a straight up measurement of the outside,” says planetary geophysicist Robert Grimm of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who presented some of the results. “We hope that Mare Crisium is far enough away [from the heat-rich terrain] that it represents the normal moon, the background moon.” Several of the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ‘70s landed in ancient lunar lava flows called maria. The rocks returned by astronauts were rich in elements that scientists collectively call KREEP, for the elements they contain. Researchers assumed that composition was similar in rocks all over the moon. So it was a surprise in the late 1990s when NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft found radioactive proxies for those elements concentrated in a region that includes many of the nearside lava flows — but hardly anywhere else. That region is now called the Procellarum KREEP Terrane, or PKT. All those radioactive elements could have provided enough heat to melt the mantle beneath the PKT, creating volcanic flows there but not on the rest of the moon, scientists proposed in 2000. But without measurements from outside the PKT, they couldn’t be sure. That’s where Blue Ghost comes in. Radioactive elements such as heat-producing thorium are surprisingly clustered in one part of the moon’s nearside, as seen in this false color map. Blue Ghost landed in a basin (circled) outside that region to see if the moon’s temperature was different in another spot. In this map, white marks the highest thorium concentrations, purple the lowest.NASA The lander carried two instruments that could probe the moon’s internal temperature, one that drilled nearly a meter beneath the lander to measure heat flow, and another that inferred temperatures down to about 200 kilometers. If lava flows in the maria were mainly due to heat-producing elemen
A private moon lander challenges ideas about lunar volcanism
