A camera, sample collection arm and the CODEX instrument will remain on the lander, while a rover equipped with a camera and rake will scoop and transport samples back to the lander instruments for detailed study. In our lab, we have shown that CODEX can accurately date rock samples like those we expect to find at Ina with a precision of better than ☓75 million years, which is more than sufficient to situate the origin of Ina in the billions-of-years-long history of the Moon.”ĭIMPLE is part of NASA’s Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM), which will be delivered to Ina through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. “By contrast, the entire DIMPLE payload is going to weigh less than 50 kilograms and needs to run autonomously on the Moon. Traditional techniques are not easily adapted to spaceflight, requiring a sizable laboratory and several months to determine a date,” Anderson said. The SwRI-led team has been developing CODEX for two decades. The CODEX instrument exploits the natural radioactive decay of rubidium into strontium as a measure of how much time has elapsed since a rock sample formed. These techniques accurately determine the ages of rocks and minerals, allowing scientists to date events such as crystallization, metamorphism and impacts.” “Radioactive decay is a clock that ticks at a known rate. Jonathan Levine, a physicist at Colgate University who serves as DIMPLE’s deputy principal investigator. “That’s why radioisotope dating is so important,” says Dr. If rock formations like Ina do not give rise to impact craters, or do not preserve them over the eons, then some current ideas about solar system history could be wrong.
Or, if we find that Ina is as old as typical lunar rocks, that indicates that the material properties of certain rocks can fool us, if we are not careful, as we try to understand the ages of planetary surfaces throughout the solar system.” “If Ina really is as young as it appears, that means that the Moon has been volcanically active much more recently than scientists have thought. “This challenges our understanding of lunar geochemical evolution, since a geologically recent eruption requires unexpectedly long-lived heat sources in the lunar interior,” Anderson said. Impact craters build up on the lunar surface over time, so older surfaces generally have more impact craters compared to younger surfaces.
Ina looks much younger than other places on the Moon because it has very few impact craters. Ina is an enigmatic formation of unusually smooth mounds surrounded by rough troughs, all inside the central crater of a large volcano. “We are going to date the rocks at Ina directly using the first-ever purpose-built radioisotope rock dating instrument for use in space, called CODEX (Chemistry Organic and Dating Experiment).” Scott Anderson, who is principal investigator of DIMPLE. “I am thrilled for the opportunity to send DIMPLE to the Moon to better understand the age and composition of Ina,” said SwRI Staff Scientist Dr.
#NASA LUNAR LANDER CONSTRUCTION KIT PATCH#
DIMPLE, which was developed by SwRI, will use cameras and radioisotope-based dating to determine the age and composition of an anomalously young-looking patch of basalt named Ina. July 19, 2023 - NASA has selected Southwest Research Institute to lead a $50 million lunar lander/rover instrument suite, Dating an Irregular Mare Patch with a Lunar Explorer, or DIMPLE, designed to understand if the Moon has been volcanically active in the geologically recent past.
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