SAMPLES CHANGE THINKING ON MOON COOLING

Remnants of solidified lava brought back from the moon by a Chinese mission were 1.96 billion years old, compared with the 2.9 billion years of samples by Soviet and U.S. missions, says an article in the journal Science, suggesting the moon cooled later than thought. China's Chang'e-5 mission sampled an unvisited part of a lava plain, the Oceanus Procellarum. It “has high concentrations of potassium, thorium and uranium, elements that generate heat through longlived radioactive decay,” the authors wrote.