India's Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander became the first craft to ever touch down at the lunar south pole on Aug. 23 — and the probe has wasted very little time scientifically exploring an environment that no mission from any country has ever visited.
Now, one instrument aboard the Chandrayaan-3 mission's moon rover Pragyan has found surprising traces of sulfur within the lunar south pole's soil.
Called Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and created by the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems in Bangalore, that instrument probes the lunar surface by quite literally obliterating it. To observe a substance, LIBS fires laser pulses at a sample, which then vaporizes the substance into a brief plasma. The instrument picks up light emitted from that plasma and analyzes the wavelengths to discern what elements lie within.
Source: www.space.com
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