The article could have been written much more clearly for a geral audience understanding. What they’re saying is that the temperature sensors are possibly not recording what they expected to record. Probably because the surface near the sensors was disturbed and changed the thermal properties of the ground near the sensors, but the old data is degraded and more study is needed to figure it out.
Devising a good experiment can be hard. When the first lunar mission landed, they weren’t 100% sure the whole lander wouldn’t just sink into the soil and suffocate the astronauts. Learning how the lunar surface composition traps or releases solar radiation would be a huge part of any future lunar mission.
I know what the article says - unless the astronauts blasted the area to lay the probes with strip mining there can’t have been that much displacement of “black thermal dust” because it would’ve settled back. If the point was that the hike topsoil had different thermal properties than the deeper probes - well DUH - you still have the same problem on earth and it’s not a “discovery” worthy of a scientific paper. (Hey Clark, I drilled into your limestone and replaced it with mud - dunno why I’m gettin weird temperature readings. Must be that global warmin)
That is why the astronauts were preceded with several Ranger and Surveyor missions. The science of getting to the moon was accomplished over significant span of time with a lot of experimental hardware.