Last week SciDaily flooded its zone with findings from our ancient and dry moon: early magmas, and more-earlier magmas. Also Japan's JAXA landed a lander, but (I hear) upsidedown so they're shutting it down to save power before daylight can hit it.
Inb4 jokes about Australia's upcoming effort.
The magma formed those basalts which we see in 3.5 Gya; from iron and magnesium. (Granites feature on the side we don't see.) 3.5 Gya's when the iron, which is more common on Earth, got swapped with the magnesium. Also a lot of those basalts are high in titanium now.
Before 4 Gya that crust had more water. One Tara Hayden has found apatite (another joke I could hardly miss); on a natural lunar sample, brought to us by meteorite. Formerly we hadn't seen apatite in ancient "anorthosite" crustal rocks; this meteorite was anorthosite. These weren't from the basalts which be more-recent; they're from the liquid-moon phase.
Meanwhile we are also pondering dusty rocks. These might tell us something about the Moon's magnetism. You'll recall magnetic powder from this blog as of use, in partic'lar, for telling the (relative) age of some rubble.
JAXA were going for a magmatic part of the moon too. Let's hope it works! NASA, this side of the world, are still planning to visit features by rover.
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