2026-02-09 中国科学院（CAS）
Topographic map of the lunar farside based on LRO LOLA Data. (Image by YUE Zongyu’s team)
＜関連情報＞
- https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/research_news/earth/202602/t20260209_1150262.shtml
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady9265
嫦娥6号の裏側サンプルを用いた月年表モデルと初期衝突史への示唆 Lunar chronology model with the Chang’e-6 farside samples and implications for the early impact history
Zongyu Yue, Sheng Gou, Yexin Wang, Huacheng Li, […] , and Fuyuan Wu
Science Advances Published:4 Feb 2026
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady9265
Abstract
The radiometric ages of the returned samples are the cornerstone of lunar cratering chronology models. However, all the previous samples were from the lunar nearside and the radiometric ages of those samples that can be associated with particular surfaces are <4.0 billion years. On 25 June 2024, Chang’e-6 successfully returned 1.935-kilogram samples from the lunar farside. The samples included local basalts with an age of 2807 ± 3 million years and the norites with an age of 4247 ± 5 million years likely corresponding to the age of the South Pole–Aitken basin. With these radiometric ages, we refined the lunar chronology function (CF) and verified that it is still consistent with a combination of an exponential decrease and a linear rate. We further derived the impacting rate and found it supports a smooth decay instead of abrupt changes of the impactor flux at early times. The refined lunar CF can be used to obtain more reliable ages for unsampled lunar areas and provide critical constraint for the lunar early impact history.
