The mineral, dubbed Changesite-(Y), is the sixth mineral discovered on the Moon by humankind and the first new mineral discovered on the Moon by China, making it the third country in the world, after the US and Russia, to discover a lunar mineral.
Scientists found a single crystal of a new phosphate mineral while analyzing lunar basalt particles, which were collected from the moon two years ago by the Chang'e-5 mission.
Few new minerals have been discovered on the moon, though. The US and the former Soviet Union have found five, and the International Mineralogical Association has now confirmed that the China National Space Administration (CNSA) has discovered a sixth moon mineral: Changesite-(Y).
The first rover to visit the far side of the moon, China's Yutu-2, has found stark differences between there and the near side. These include stickier, more supportive soil on the far side and a greater abundance of small rocks and impact craters.
Chinese scientists have found a new lunar mineral in the form of a crystal lurking inside samples collected from the moon in 2020. Changesite–(Y), named for the mythological Chinese goddess of the moon, Chang'e, is a phosphate mineral and columnar crystal.
China is upping its moon-mining efforts; the next mission, the Chang'e-7, will reportedly focus on the search for water near the moon's South Pole.
Unexpected gold: on the Moon
Satellite imaging has shown that the top 10 centimetres of regolith (moon soil) at the south pole of the moon appear to hold about 100 times more gold than the richest mines on earth.
On Friday, Our Space, a Chinese language science channel affiliated with China National Space Administration, posted an update. There is no monolith, no secret base on the rim of a lunar crater. Close up, it turns out to be just a rock. The seemingly perfect geometric shape was just a trick of angle, light and shadow.
Yes, the flag is still on the moon, but you can't see it using a telescope. I found some statistics on the size of lunar equipment in a Press Kit for the Apollo 16 mission. The flag is 125 cm (4 feet) long, and you would need an optical wavelength telescope around 200 meters (~650 feet) in diameter to see it.
China's Chang'e 5 lunar lander just marked a historic first: The spacecraft became the first to detect water on the moon at its landing site in real time.
Valuable titanium ore
Titanium on the moon is primarily found in the mineral ilmenite, a compound that contains iron, titanium and oxygen. If humans one day mine on the moon, they could break down ilmenite to separate these elements.
China has returned helium-3 from the moon, opening door to future technology. The Chinese Chang'e 5 mission has returned a new mineral from the lunar surface.
And the Moon may also have ores of rare, incompatible, lithophile elements such as beryllium, lithium, zirconium, niobium, tantalum, and so forth.
These samples contain no water and provide no evidence for living organisms at any time in the Moon's history. The overall set of lunar samples collected during the Apollo program can be classified into three major rock types, basalts, breccias, and lunar highland rocks. Apollo 11 mainly collected basalts and breccias.
Six flags were planted on the Moon – one for each Apollo landing. Apollo 11's flag was too close to the lander and was knocked over by the rocket exhaust when Armstrong and Aldrin took off again. But high resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the other five are still standing.
The very first nation to reach the surface of the moon was the USSR (Russia), whose unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 impacted the moon' surface on 12 September 1959. While Luna 2 was the first probe to land on the moon, it had been designed to crash-land into the surface (a "hard landing") rather than conduct a soft landing.
To date, only one country has succeeded in landing humans on the moon: the United States of America. As part of the Apollo space program, the United States has landed a total of 12 astronauts.
Aside from trash—from food packaging to wet wipes—nearly 100 packets of human urine and excrement have been discarded. The Apollo astronauts also dumped tools and television equipment that they no longer needed.
Scientists' first confirmation that titanium exists on the moon came from analysis of the samples brought back by NASA's Apollo missions. Six landings occurred between 1969 through 1972.
Besides the 2019 Chinese rover Yutu-2, the only artificial objects on the Moon that are still in use are the retroreflectors for the lunar laser ranging experiments left there by the Apollo 11, 14, and 15 astronauts, and by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 missions.
NASA is on a mission to explore a Greek-named asteroid called 16 Psyche that contains a double-edged sword. Made completely of metal, it boasts enough gold to either make every person on Earth a billionaire—or to collapse the gold market and destabilize the entire global financial world.
Scientists have found evidence of cubic zirconia in Moon rocks, showing that the universe not only holds diamonds, but its own fire-safe knock-offs.
The fact that the moon probe Surveyor V1 revealed the existence of an appreciable amount of carbon on the surface of the moon, in the neighbourhood of its site, lends strong support to a conjecture I made in 1965 (Optima 15, 160) that there may well be a relatively high concentration of micro-diamonds on the surface of ...
The moon isn't so barren after all. A 2009 NASA mission—in which a rocket slammed into the moon and a second spacecraft studied the blast—revealed that the lunar surface contains an array of compounds, including gold, silver, and mercury, according to PBS.