Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
For the first time, scientists hold real dirt from the Moon’s farside, thanks to China’s Chang’e-6—a game-changer in lunar exploration (National Science Review, 2025).
Graduate researcher Lin Jiarui discovered the dust lacked typical glassy melt—a surprise that hints at softer, stranger weather on the dark side.
Solar wind—not meteoroids—carves the farside's features. A direct blow to decades of Apollo-based assumptions about lunar erosion.
Microscope views revealed larger iron grains than expected—solar wind might be fusing and clumping iron more than we ever imagined.
Unlike Apollo samples, these particles had no impact glass, just solar-battered skins—suggesting far less meteorite activity on the farside.
Nearside samples show signs of Earth’s magnetotail shielding them. The farside? Totally exposed, sun-blasted, and scarred by solar fury.
Sputtering from solar wind versus glass from micrometeoroids—on the farside, solar sputter wins, warping rock in strange new ways.
This research confirms a real space-weathering “dichotomy” between Moon’s halves—not just terrain, but how the Moon ages itself.
These dusty clues offer a blueprint for understanding how other airless worlds like Mercury or asteroids evolve under cosmic conditions.