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A Chinese space probe has returned to Earth with the first samples ever taken from the far side of the moon. Here's NPR's Geoff Brumfiel.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, one of the first things Neil Armstrong did was to pick up a bunch of rocks.
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NEIL ARMSTRONG: Tried to get as many representative types as I could.
BRUMFIEL: Those rocks ended up changing everything we understood about the moon. Previously, scientists thought that it was formed when a bunch of asteroids near Earth gradually glommed together. Planetary scientist Richard Carlson says the minerals in the moon rocks suggest a much more violent origin story.
RICHARD CARLSON: The wisdom now is that something the size of Mars, for example, hit the Earth at a glancing angle and spalled off enough material to put it into orbit and form the moon.
BRUMFIEL: The moon was ripped from the Earth by the collision. It formed a giant ball of molten magma that cooled into the orb we see in the sky. It's a good theory, but evidence is limited because the Apollo missions all landed on the near side of the moon, the one that always faces the Earth.
CARLSON: You know, you think about understanding the geology of the Earth as if you only landed in North America - you'd be missing a big part of the story, right?
BRUMFIEL: China's latest robotic probe called Chang'e 6 landed on the far side of the moon. Earlier this month, it scooped up samples from a lava flow in an area known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
BRUMFIEL: Carlson, who is an emeritus researcher at Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C., says these new samples should confirm that Apollo origin story that the entire moon was forged quickly.
CARLSON: Looking at a lava flow that came out on the far side of the moon - so as far away from any of the Apollo areas you can get - if that gives the same age as the stuff from Apollo, then the likelihood is you're really looking at a global event.
BRUMFIEL: Or it could teach us a new story about the moon. China and the U.S. are in competition with each other these days, including over the moon. Both nations say they want to send humans back to the lunar surface by the end of the decade. But China has also offered to send some of its new moon samples to American researchers, and NASA is allowing them to submit proposals. Carlson's all for it.
CARLSON: Somehow I suspect that international politics doesn't depend on our models for the origin of the moon (laughter).
BRUMFIEL: He says there's a lot we can learn about the universe if we can first learn to share.
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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