China’s Chang’e 6 Mission Found Rare Meteorite Fragments on Moon

Unexpected meteorite fragments discovered on the far side of the Moon

TO Jenna Ahart & Nature magazine

While sifting through the first-ever rock samples collected from the far side of the Moon, scientists in China have discovered a surprise: fragments of a rare type of meteorite that could help piece together the history of the solar system. Debris – was caught by China's Chang'e 6 mission and returned to Earth last June. – resembles asteroid material carrying dust that existed before the appearance of the solar system. Studying the chemical composition of this debris could help trace how asteroids seeded planetary bodies such as the Earth and Moon with volatile compounds, including water.

“The Chang'e 6 mission had a list of major questions that needed to be answered, but this wasn't even on that list,” says Yuqi Qian, an Earth and planetary scientist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in analyzing the fragments. “This is such a surprising and important discovery.”

the authors reported their discovery earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Near and far

Most missions that have returned rocks from the Moon have taken samples from the surface facing Earth—the near side—which has fewer craters and more volcanic activity. However, Chang'e 6 landed on the far side, in the Moon's largest and deepest crater, the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which accounts for about a quarter of the Moon's surface area. One of the main challenges was to better understand why the far side is so different from the near side.

Another option was to explore the huge pool that scientists believe was formed when an asteroid crashed into the Moon about four billion years ago. The crater is likely rich in fragments from this and other asteroid impacts, as well as rocks from the moon's mantle (the layer under the crust) kicked up by the impacts.

But the discovery of rare meteorite fragments came as a surprise. At first, researchers thought the samples came from the moon's mantle. But after analyzing the levels of iron, manganese and zinc in the debris, they found a discrepancy with other lunar materials, indicating that it was not from the Moon itself. So the team examined the relative levels of three oxygen isotopes in the samples; these relationships are “like a human fingerprint” and can tell you what type of planetary body the debris came from, says Mang Lin, the paper's author and a geochemist at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (GIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “This approach is essentially space expertise.”

The isotope signature closely matched that of two rocky asteroids already studied by humans, named Ryugu and Bennu. NASA took samples from Bennu in 2020and Japanese Space Agency collected fragments of Ryugu in 2019. Both asteroids contained dust grains that predate the solar system, as well as elusive volatile compounds such as water.

Analysis of the new fragments appears to confirm that this type of asteroid delivered a significant supply of water and other compounds to the Moon. Further study of the chemical composition of the samples will allow scientists to find out what role such space rocks played in the development of the Earth and the Moon. “The find is particularly interesting because this type of meteorite rarely survives its impact on Earth, so specimens are rare,” says co-author Jintuan Wang, a geosciences researcher also from GIG. “These materials are extremely fragile and tend to disintegrate when released into the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Team leader Yi-Gang Xu, also from GIG, believes that by studying more samples of Chang'e-6, the team could pinpoint the age of such meteorite fragments, which would help determine whether their parent asteroid created the South Pole-Aitken basin.

This article is reproduced with permission and has been first published October 22, 2025

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