China's Yutu-2 rover, part of its Chang'e 4 lunar mission, rolls across the far side of the moon in January 2019.
The first rover ever to visit the far side of the moon has discovered a layer of lunar dust up to 12 meters (39 feet) deep. The rover measured the moon's surface dust with radar for the first time, and researchers from China and Italy described the results in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
Lunar dust, also called regolith, is a talc-like substance of pulverized rock and dust that settled after asteroids bombarded the moon's surface billions of years ago. The Chang'e 4 findings confirm that this dust also coats the far side of the moon, in a layer that the scientists described as "quite thick."
Below the 39 feet of fine dust, the Chang'e 4 rover also found a layer of coarse material full of rocks, followed by alternating layers of coarse and fine substances up to 40 meters (131 feet) deep.
Lunar dust can cloud a spacecraft's instruments as it approaches the moon's surface, raising the risk of failure.
Regolith measurements across the moon's surface could help future spacecraft avoid those problems.
Though China has not shared a specific timeline for the rest of the mission, the robots' goals on the moon's far side are to take photos of the barren landscape, study lunar geology, look for water ice, and scan the night sky for radio bursts.
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