The UAE is the latest country to announce a lunar mission, aiming to send the first Arab space rover to the moon by 2024. He’s now taking the information gleaned from the moon and is applying it to other airless bodies, such as Mercury.Īll this explains why renewed interest in lunar missions by space agencies around the world is cause for celebration for Li, who now works at the University of Hawaii as an assistant researcher, as well as the wider scientific community.įor years, scientists have primarily relied upon samples brought back by NASA’s Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, but a flurry of countries putting more rovers and humans on the moon mean more, and more recent, samples to analyze. Li says hematite samples could be used as “fossils” to understand more about the Earth’s history, particularly mass extinction events, and how the atmosphere might have changed. Such discoveries don’t only teach us about Earth’s closest celestial neighbor, they can also inform scientists about other planets, including Earth, and how they were formed. This year, it was announced that he had found evidence, using more data from Chandrayaan-1, of hematite-a form of iron oxide, or rust, that normally requires oxygen and water-on the moon. Li compared this data to samples collected by NASA’s Apollo missions, and found evidence of water in nearly all the large pyroclastic deposits-rock fragments erupted by a volcano-in areas that had been mapped.īut Li didn’t stop there. He and a colleague used surface data collected by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, the spectrographic imager that was part of India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, which launched in 2008 and operated for around ten months before contact with the lunar orbiter was lost. But I felt that it didn’t matter because I just started my career, I can fail once or twice.” “My PhD advisor and others all felt like it was worthless to try they tried to convince me not to as a freshly graduated student.

“If we want to understand Earth’s history, we have to go to the moon to do it.” Instead, he did an undergraduate degree in geology (“close enough,” he says), and then set his sights on the US to pursue his dreams.ĭuring his PhD thesis at Brown University, Rhode Island, Li focused on the existence of water on the surface of the moon, convinced that hundreds of previous studies could have been limited by out-of-date technology. But when it came time for him to choose a career, a fully fledged space industry didn’t yet exist in China. Li was fascinated with the solar system as a child growing up in Taikang, in China’s Henan Province.

Moon secrets 2016