Ahead of Chandrayaan-4, IIT and PRL team decodes moon’s titanium-rich rocks Premium

IIT and PRL researchers unveil insights on titanium-rich lunar rocks, aiding ISRO's Chandrayaan-4 mission to select landing sites.

The moon’s surface is covered by ancient lava flows that are often different from those found on the earth. While volcanic rocks on the earth rarely contain more than 2% titanium dioxide (TiO2), some lunar basalts — common volcanic rocks — carry up to 18%, a fact that planetary scientists have struggled to explain for decades.

A new study by researchers from IIT-Kharagpur and the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, has now offered an experimental account of how these titanium-rich basalts could have formed.

The study’s authors were Himela Moitra, Sujoy Ghosh, Tamalkanti Mukherjee, Saibal Gupta, and Kuljeet Kaur Marhas.

The Chandrayaan-4 mission, which the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has planned for 2028, aims to collect rock samples from the moon and return them to the earth, making the choice of landing site critical. The study’s findings could help inform that decision.

Prof. Ghosh, one of the lead authors and associate professor at IIT-Kharagpur, said, “Regions near the lunar south pole, such as those being evaluated for Chandrayaan-4, including areas near Shiv Shakti  region, have been studied in detail using data from Chandrayaan-2, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and other missions. What our work adds is a deep interior perspective.”

According to the study’s first author Himela Moitra, “High-resolution microscopic cameras on landers can help identify minerals in lunar rocks, while instruments such as X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction can determine their chemical composition before collection.”