Big success of Chandrayaan 2: ‘Argon-40’ gas discovered in outer atmosphere of Moon

The race to understand the complex processes taking place on the Moon’s surface and its atmosphere is intensifying. Many countries are trying to know more and more about the Moon. The US space agency NASA is going ahead with its second manned mission to the Moon. Meanwhile, the Indian Space Agency ‘ISRO’ (ISRO) has claimed an interesting discovery. ISRO has said that its Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has found a significant gas in the Moon’s upper atmosphere. ISRO has reported that Chandrayaan’s ‘Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2’ (CHACE-2) instrument has detected ‘Argon-40’ gas in the lunar exosphere. This is the outermost region of the Moon’s atmosphere, where atoms and molecules rarely collide with each other.

ISRO hopes that its observation will help in understanding the extraterrestrial species around the Moon.
This observation can also help in understanding the radiogenic activities under the surface of the Moon.

ISRO’s according toThe discovery is significant because Argon-40 is a noble gas, which makes it one of the most stable gases and serves as a key tracer to understand lunar surface processes. Is. According to ISRO, the ‘Ar-40’ gas originates from the radioactive disintegration of Potassium-40 (K-40) present under the surface of the Moon.

The discovery is also significant because the Apollo-17 and LADEE missions detected the presence of Ar-40 gas on the Moon’s outskirts, but that discovery was limited to the near-equatorial region of the Moon. For the first time, Chandrayaan’s ‘Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2’ (CHACE-2) instrument has continuously observed Ar-40 gases in the latitude range of -60 to +60 degrees. This Study Geophysical Research Letters has been published in Journals.

Chandrayaan-2 mission is also important for ISRO because in the year 2019, its lander and rover were destroyed due to lack of soft landing. The CHACE-2 instrument aboard its orbiter was unharmed and continued its experiments on the Moon.

Later this year, ISRO is planning to launch the ‘Chandrayaan-3’ mission to attempt to land on the lunar surface once again.