Dec 22, 2015 12:41 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A Chinese moon lander identified a lunar rock unlike anything discovered and analyzed in the last 46 years.

According to The Guardian, the rock the unmanned Chang'e-3 probe discovered is not a match with rocks previously discovered in 1969 by U.S. astronauts or three years later when the Soviet Union explored the moon with an unmanned craft.

"We now have 'ground truth' for our remote sensing, a well-characterized sample in a key location," study co-author Bradley L. Jolliff, the a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a press release. "We see the same signal from orbit in other places, so we now know that those other places probably have similar basalts.

"The diversity tells us that the Moon's upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth's," he said. "And correlating chemistry with age, we can see how the Moon's volcanism changed over time."

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the new study comes from scientists at several different Chinese institutions associated with the Chang'e-3 mission, as well as the Shandong University partnership with WU - St. Louis.

"The variable titanium distribution on the lunar surface suggests that the Moon's interior was not homogenized," Jolliff said. "We're still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. Possibly there were big impacts during the magma ocean stage that disrupted the mantle's formation.

"You still have to explain how you get to an olivine-rich and ilmenite-rich rock. One way to do that would be to mix, or hybridize, two different sources."

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