We're all familiar with the moon, it hangs in the sky above our heads most nights and
you probably know it well enough to recognize the ever-famous face of the 'man on the moon'.
Yet the moon is tidally locked to the earth, meaning that it takes the moon as long to
rotate on its axis as it takes to orbit the earth- about 27 days.
This is why when you look up into the sky night after night, the moon always looks the
same.
This leaves the dark side of the moon, or the side not visible to us, as somewhat of
a mystery to most people, and just recently that mystery deepened.
Today we're taking a look at this massive moon mystery in Giant mass discovered on the
far side of the moon.
On July 20th, 1969, the world held its breath as two American astronauts began their descent
to the lunar surface.
Packed inside a lander the size of a large closet, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin slowly
eased their vessel, the Eagle, to the surface below.
The moon had previously been explored remotely by telescope and moon probes, but people were
still unsure what the conditions on the surface were like.
Some feared that the lander would come down on ground that was nothing more than loose
soil, and the entire spacecraft could be swallowed up as if it had fallen into quicksand.
As the Eagle slowly descended, millions of Americans, and millions more of earth's citizens
around the world, all held their breath, watching the greatest accomplishment in human history
unfold on their television screens- unsure if they would be watching a mighty triumph,
or a horrible catastrophe.
Eventually Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their safe landing, and a half hour later
they stuck the American flag on soil that was loose, yet still firm enough to safely
stand on.
Their initial explorations of the moon, and the following Apollo missions, all revealed
a lunar landscape made up of a thick layer of loose and very fine dust, but with solid
crust underneath; the result of lava flows and the impacts of tens of thousands of asteroids.
With an interest in one day building a lunar base, which could serve as a jumping-off point
for manned missions deeper into the solar system, NASA began to study the composition
of the moon in detail.
Yet interest waned as the American manned space program got stuck in lower earth orbit
for the last fifty years.
Today though there is once again talk at NASA of returning to the moon, with plans to put
the first woman on the moon in 2024 as part of NASA's growing push to put humans deeper
into space than ever before, and one day in the 2030s, on the surface of Mars itself.
This has created a need for updated maps and geographical knowledge of the moon, a task
which various international probes and orbiters have been tackling for the last few years.
NASA's astronauts will eventually build a manned lab on the moon from which to conduct
research and even mine for fuel and other resources that are too cost-prohibitive to
put into orbit from earth.
This means that we need to know as much about the moon as possible long before the first
humans go back.
It was in one such recent preparatory study that a stunning anomaly was discovered on
the dark side of the moon lurking just below the lunar surface.
With its face permanently turned away from us, the dark side of the moon is the least
understood by the general public, and has fueled conspiracy theories for decades.
Everything from an alien base, to crashed alien spaceships, to a secret joint-American
and Russian base have all been claimed to exist on the side of the moon we never get
to see from earth, and while no nation's spacecraft have ever discovered any of these things,
what they have discovered recently hints at a massive mystery with no clear answer.
The anomaly was discovered in early April of this year, and consists of a titanic mass
of material that initially had scientists staring at their data in disbelief.
Located just beneath the largest surviving impact crater in the solar system, the Moon's
south pole Aitken basin, is a mass of material lurking just beneath the lunar surface that
is suspected to be metal from an asteroid that crashed into the moon billions of years
ago.
Data shows that the buried anomaly is a mass of metal roughly five times bigger than the
big island of Hawaii, and the crater itself is 1,243 miles (2,000 kilometers wide)- that's
the distance from Waco, Texas, to Washington D.C.
The crater is also several miles deep, and the weight of this mysterious mass is so great
that it actually drags down the basin floor by as much as a half-mile.
Scientists speculate that the mass is the result of the initial impact, and contains
most of the asteroid's metal core.
If so then this impact must have been titanic indeed, and would have without a doubt been
a life-killer for anything crawling around on earth a few billion years ago.
While the impact is estimated to have been about 4 billion years ago, it's believed that
life got its start on earth 3.5 billion years ago- at least that's how far back the fossil
record has taken us.
Perhaps life was around when this massive impact happened, and if so then we might owe
our very survival to the moon being a real class act and taking one for the team.
Other scientists however are skeptical of the mystery mass really being the surviving
core of a huge asteroid, as it would be extremely unlikely that so much of it would survive
impact and then stay relatively put for billions of years.
Instead they believe that the mystery mass is nothing more than dense oxides created
during the last stage of lunar magma ocean solidification.
This would have taken place approximately around the same time as the asteroid impact
and as a result of the moon finally cooling off from its violent birth as the remains
of a planetoid impact with the young earth.
For many millions of years the heat of the impact was trapped inside the dense core of
the moon, much like in the earth, and kept heated by the decay of radioactive elements.
Eventually though as the moon cooled its volcanic activity ceased and its oceans of magma solidified
into the crust we see today and that US astronauts played golf on five decades ago.
The giant mystery mass would thus be nothing more than the anomalous, but perfectly natural,
aggregation of really dense oxides that were trapped by the cooling lava over a hundred
miles beneath the surface.
Sadly without a return to the moon we won't be solving this mystery anytime soon, and
will have to speculate on the real nature and origin of this massive moon mystery for
at least five more years to come- if NASA's budget isn't pulled again.
However, conspiracy theorists have wasted no time in jumping onto the mystery and have
already offered a dozen explanations for the anomalous mass lurking beneath the surface,
everything from a buried Kaiju to, you guessed it, alien bases.
Personally the alien hypothesis is the one that's most exciting, because to be honest
the universe seems like a really big, but really lonely place.
It would be nice if we had next door neighbors all this time, and getting to know an alien
civilization would give us a great comparison point on our own.
To know ourselves we must first know others, only then can we find out what's really unique
and extraordinary about humanity.
Or perhaps we're just painting a rosy picture to get your guard down, because we here at
The Infographics Show secretly worship our alien overlords from Zeti Reticuli who have
built a moon base from which to eventually invade the earth and eat your delicious brains.
What do you think is really buried beneath the dark side of the moon?
Are your brains delicious/- we're asking for a friend.
Let us know in the comments, and as always if you enjoyed this video don't forget to
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