かぐやデータと月試料の融合研究が拓く月科学

抄録

The Earth's moon has made significant contributions both in advances of space exploration and planetary science. Rock samples returned from the Moon by Apollo and Luna missions provided us with basic understandings of the origin and evolution of Moon, Earth, and other rocky planets in the solar system. Yet, the global compositional data from subsequent orbital satellites (Galileo, Clementine, and Lunar Prospector) and analyses of lunar meteorites have revealed the diversity of the surface composition and the nearside-farside asymmetry of the Moon. These data suggest that the crustal evolution and thermal history of the Moon should be by far more complex than that inferred from the Apollo samples which only represent the central nearside. KAGUYA (SELENE) mission now provides high-precision, high-spacial-resolution and high-energy-resolution remote sensing data on physical and chemical properties of the global Moon. The state-of-art data set, coupled with the latest results of lunar sample analyses, enables us to demonstrate the currently proposed model for a bimodal crustal evolution, and provides clues to answer the primary issues on the lunar origin and evolution.