¹Megan Bruck Syal, ²Peter H. Schultz ³Miriam A. Riner
¹Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, PO Box 808 L-405, Livermore, California 94551, USA
²Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Brown University, 324 Brook St Box 1846, Providence Rhode Island 02912, USA
³Planetary Science Institute, 1700 East Fort Lowell, Suite 106, Tucson Arizona 85719, USA Miriam A. Riner

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Reference
Bruck Syal M,Schultz PH, Riner MA (2015) Darkening of Mercury’s surface by cometary carbon.
Nature Geoscience 8, 352–356
Link to Article [doi:10.1038/ngeo2397]

¹Jinhai Zhang et al. (>10)*
¹Key Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Physics, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
*Find the extensive, full author and affiliation list on the publishers website

We report the surface exploration by the lunar rover Yutu that landed on the young lava flow in the northeastern part of the Mare Imbrium, which is the largest basin on the nearside of the Moon and is filled with several basalt units estimated to date from 3.5 to 2.0 Ga. The onboard lunar penetrating radar conducted a 114-m-long profile, which measured a thickness of ∼5 m of the lunar regolith layer and detected three underlying basalt units at depths of 195, 215, and 345 m. The radar measurements suggest underestimation of the global lunar regolith thickness by other methods and reveal a vast volume of the last volcano eruption. The in situ spectral reflectance and elemental analysis of the lunar soil at the landing site suggest that the young basalt could be derived from an ilmenite-rich mantle reservoir and then assimilated by 10–20% of the last residual melt of the lunar magma ocean.

Reference
Zhang J et al. (2015) Volcanic history of the Imbrium basin: A close-up view from the lunar rover Yutu. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (17) 5342-5347
Link to Article [doi:10.1073/pnas.1503082112]