Moon rocks brought to Earth by Chinese mission fill key gaps in solar system history

[Judi Lynn]

By Meghan Bartels about 5 hours ago

The 2-billion-year-old rocks fill a key gap.



The Chang'e 5 return capsule at its landing site in Inner Mongolia, China, on Dec. 17, 2020. (Image credit: CNSA)

China's new moon-rock treasure trove may be a billion years younger than the material the Apollo program brought home decades ago, according to new research.

All told, in December, China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft managed to return 3.81 pounds (1.73 kilograms) of moon rock from a region called Oceanus Procellarum to scientists on Earth. Since then, scientists with access to the precious material have begun a bevy of experiments to understand the rocks and the secrets of the solar system that they might hold.

And the spacecraft seems to have snagged the perfect sample to fill a critical hole in scientists' knowledge, a new study reports: Two tiny pieces of the newly returned lunar rock have now been dated to about 1.97 billion years old, give or take 50 million years.

"It is the perfect sample to close a 2-billion-year gap," Brad Jolliff, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri and a co-author on the new research, which was led by a team based in Beijing, said in a statement.

More:
https://www.space.com/china-change-5-moon-rock-age-volcanism?utm_source=notification