Lunar chronology model with the Chang’e-6 farside samples and implications for the early impact history
- Zongyu Yue
- Sheng Gou
- Yexin Wang
- Huacheng Li
- Gregory Michael
- Jianzhong Liu
- Shujuan Sun
- Yangting Lin
- Kaichang Di
- Qiuli Li
- Yi Chen
- Wei Yang
- Bin Xie
- Sen Hu
- Shouding Li
- Bo Zheng
- Tianqiao Mao
- Xianhua Li
- Fuyuan Wu
2026-02-04
The radiometric ages of the returned samples are the cornerstone of lunar cratering chronology models. However, all the previous samples were from the lunar nearside and the radiometric ages of those samples that can be associated with particular surfaces are <4.0 billion years. On 25 June 2024, Chang’e-6 successfully returned 1.935-kilogram samples from the lunar farside. The samples included local basalts with an age of 2807 ± 3 million years and the norites with an age of 4247 ± 5 million years likely corresponding to the age of the South Pole–Aitken basin. With these radiometric ages, we refined the lunar chronology function (CF) and verified that it is still consistent with a combination of an exponential decrease and a linear rate. We further derived the impacting rate and found it supports a smooth decay instead of abrupt changes of the impactor flux at early times. The refined lunar CF can be used to obtain more reliable ages for unsampled lunar areas and provide critical constraint for the lunar early impact history.