Multiple bullets containing a tiny spectrometer could be shot into the lunar soil by an astronaut or rover, allowing analysis of a wide area all at once.
NASA has proposed shooting at the moon to further our understanding of what it's made of.The out-of-this-world plan would involve an astronaut or rover using a special gun to shoot sensors into the soil. This would allow detailed analysis of its chemistry over a wide area, NASA scientists suggested at the 37th International Geological Congress 2024.These sensor bullets would be miniaturized spectrometers, which would use a special type of diffraction called Fresnel diffraction.
Using a compressed gas gun, astronomers or lunar rovers would fire several of these spectroscopy bullets into the lunar soil across a large area, and it could tell us exactly what it's made of without the effort of hand-digging a hole in the regolith.The moon's regolith is the layer of loose, fragmented material made up of a variety of materials that have been broken down by billions of years of meteoroid impacts, solar wind, and other space weathering processes.
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