NASA is planning to return humans to the Moon after a long period of over half a century. Many people had been wondering why astronomers didn’t go to our natural satellite since 1972 after NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. This lead to a lot of conspirational theories and one of them claims that astronauts had encountered alien life forms on the Moon that weren’t too friendly.
While aliens living on the Moon is not actually an absurd hypothesis, China’s Yutu-2 rover had found last year a green gel-looking material in a crater from our natural satellite. This obviously triggered the possibility for the more enthusiastic and conspiracy-lovers that aliens had left a signature there. But the truth is there once again to ruin our dreams.
Impact melt breccia is the culprit
Scientists have now discovered that the green material is just rock, and more specifically, impact melt breccia. Breccia is made up of fragments of minerals cemented together. The description of the peculiar substance is that it’s “dark greenish and glistening”, and it measures about 52 centimeters wide. The conclusion was made by a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and they published their results in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Within the related report, the team explained as following:
It was formed by impact-generated welding, cementing and agglutinating of lunar regolith and breccia,
Glasses in the lunar regolith are usually sourced from impact melts or from volcanic eruptions,
Hopefully, other data about what dwells upon the lunar surface will be gathered soon by upcoming explorations. The Artemis Project is bigger than all, and we can’t wait to witness it.
We all know how life goes: you can’t always get what you want. We’ll all have to wait a lot more for encountering little green men from other cosmic objects who are willing to learn from us the secrets of making a snowman.
