Chinese scientists discover new lunar mineral

Last Friday (16), Chinese scientists announced the discovery of a new mineral among samples collected on the Moon during a mission carried out two years ago, expanding the body of knowledge about the satellite, which was the target of the first space exploration.

The researchers found a single crystal of a new phosphate mineral, which they called changesite-(Y), while analyzing particles of lunar basalt, or hardened lava fragments, reported Chinese state-run newspaper The Global Times.

The discovery is linked to the Chang’e-5 mission, a Chinese unmanned lunar exploration mission that landed on the Moon on December 1, 2020. With it, China became the first country in about four decades to bring back rocks. and samples from lunar soil to Earth.

The Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification, a body of the International Mineralogical Association that reviews the introduction of mineral discoveries and their nomenclature, has confirmed the changesite-(Y) as a new inorganic, according to the China National Space Administration.

Lunar samples are key to understanding planetary evolution, said James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island, United States.

Analysis of samples collected by NASA decades ago, during the era of the Apollo moon landings and later the Soviet Union’s robotic Luna landings, has helped scientists better understand what formed the Moon.

Scientists say these findings, with the results of recent computer modeling, support the theory that the Moon was created from the debris left over from a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planetary body.

In the six Apollo missions, carried out between 1969 and 1972, NASA amassed 2,200 samples, or 382 kilograms, of moon rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface, the space agency said.

NASA continues to study samples from the Apollo missions and, in March of this year, opened one of its remaining samples in preparation for the Artemis missions to the Moon.

New samples, collected at different locations on the Moon, will expand existing knowledge about the “volatile reservoirs and geological evolution of the satellite,” NASA said in a statement. To date, most samples come from the central part of the lunar hemisphere facing Earth.

According to Clive Neal, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Notre Dame, in the United States, discoveries of new minerals on the Moon are rare. The first was armalcolite, found during the Apollo 1 mission.

Future expeditions, which include initiatives by China and the United States, target the Earth’s still unexplored territory. Samples of the satellite’s younger terrain should help broaden scientists’ understanding of how it evolved, says Professor Cline Neal.

“The Moon is still revealing some interesting secrets,” he adds.

^{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}