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First rocks returned from Moon’s far side reveal ancient volcanic activity

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2024-11-19 12:30:05

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Researchers have had their first-ever look at samples brought back from the Moon’s far side — and they detail a history of volcanic activity that spans billions of years.

The results are the first scientific analyses of samples retrieved by the Chinese mission Chang’e-6, which scooped up nearly two kilograms of lunar soil and returned it to Earth in a capsule in June. Independent research teams in China published separate papers in Science1 and Nature2 on 15 November.

“We can tell the story for a long history of volcanism and different mantle sources on the lunar far side,” says Qiu-Li Li, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a co-author of the Nature paper.

Chang’e-6 was China’s second mission to land on the lunar far side, after Chang’e-4 in 2019. Both landed in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the Moon’s oldest and largest craters, having formed in a meteor impact nearly 4 billion years ago.

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