Alien Debris Discovered in Impact Craters: Earth's Moon Has Strange Minerals

Is it possible that there are aliens on the Earth's moon? Apparently there are--sort of. Scientists have recently discovered strange minerals at the centers of impact craters on the lunar surface. These minerals may be the shattered remains of space rocks rather than parts of the moon's interior, as scientists previously believed.

In order to examine how meteorite impacts affect our moon, researchers used computer models. More specifically, they simulated high-angle, exceptionally slow impacts, revealing space rocks colliding with the lunar surface. Hundreds of impacts occur every year on the moon as space debris hurtles into the surface. While on average 73,000 pounds of meteoroids hit Earth every single day, the vast majority of these missiles burn up high in the atmosphere and never make it to the ground. Since the moon has no atmosphere, though, meteoroids aren't stopped. In fact, NASA researchers recently recorded the largest impact yet on the moon.

The scientists expected to find debris essentially vaporizing as meteorites slammed into the moon at 27,000 miles per hour. What they actually discovered to be true, though, was quite different.

"Nobody has done it at such high resolution," said planetary scientists Jay Melosh of Perdue University in an interview with Discovery News.

So what did they find with the high resolution models? The researchers discovered that when this relatively slow impact occurred, the rock that struck the surface actually shattered into a rain of debris. This debris was then swept down the crater sides and piled up in the crater's central peak.  This foreign debris actually stands out on the moon's surface mainly because it contains magnesium-rich spinel and olivine. Spinels are minerals that form under great pressure, and can be found both in the Earth's mantle and possibly the mantle of the moon. Yet they are far more commonly found in some asteroids, which explains the presence of this mineral on the barren surface of the moon.

So if the lunar dust found in impact craters is from meteorites, what does that mean? It's possible that the moon dust collected during the Apollo mission, including the samples that were recently unearthed by an archivist at Lawrence Berkeley National Library, are actually from meteorites rather than the moon itself. The study also shows a little bit more about the behavior of meteorites and impact craters in general. In fact, the new impact modeling system implies that pockets of early Earth material might be in cold storage on the moon, according to Discovery News. This could mean that if scientists gain access to these impact craters, they could learn quite a bit about our own planet.

"Even more provocative is the suggestion that we might someday find Earth's protobiological materials, no longer available on our geologically active and repeatedly recycled planet, in dry storage up in the lunar 'attic,'" said Erik Asphaug, an Arizona State University researcher, in an interview with Discovery News.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.