The unmanned Chinese Yutu lunar lander that was launched in 2013 has led to the discovery of a new kind of moon rock, according to The Guardian. For the last few years, the lander has been exploring an ancient flow of molten lava flowing along the moon and has now identified a unique mineral composition unlike anything collected by American astronauts or Soviet landers.
"We recognize a new type of lunar basalt with a distinctive mineral assemblage compared with the samples from Apollo and Luna, and the lunar meteorites," the scientists wrote.
Scientists believe that the moon formed when an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth in the early years of the solar system. The debris from this collision eventually settled and cooled, but its interior, rife with radioactive elements, heated up the rock located underneath its crust, eventually leading to the creation of volcanic lava 500 million years later.
The Yutu's instruments examined lava that is thought to have flowed approximately three billion years ago, and the new moon rock will help geologists reconstruct the rock's flow history and better understand the environmental characteristics of the moon, both in the past and present.
The unique mixture of minerals in the newly discovered rock - rich in titanium dioxide as well as olivine - is a stark contrast to the basalts collected from astronauts or the Soviet Luna probe missions, which were typically uniformly high or low in titanium, according to Tech Times.
Even more interesting is the intermediate titanium concentrations that point to a gradation in this concentration, which suggests that our previous belief that the moon's mantle cooled gradually over time may be flawed, according to Gizmodo.
"We're still trying to figure out exactly how this happened," said Bradley Jolliff, who participated in the research. "Possibly there were big impacts during the magma ocean stage that disrupted the mantle's formation."
The findings were published in the Dec. 22 issue of Nature Communications.
