The Moon The moon is believed to be roughly 4.5

The moon is believed to be roughly 4.5 billion years old and is thought to have originated when the Earth was struck by a large asteroid. Theories of the actual origin of the material which comprises the moon vary, but it is most likely material from the impactor which coalesced after it fragmented. The moon appears to have a small iron core surrounded by a crust of various minerals, thrown up into rocks in the lunar highlands. These rocks appear to be minerals which crystalized out of the magma as it cooled, and rose to the surface. As the magma cooled and shrank in size, various rearrangements took place, with some materials sinking and others rising, so that the surface is somewhat of a mixture of minerals that could have arisen from different depths.

A large portion of the moon's surface is covered with mare basalt, and ferroan anorthosites and magnesium-rich rocks constitute much of the crust. KREEP basalt rocks, which contain potassium (K) rare earth elements (REE), and phosphorous (P), are also found in the lunar highlands, along with picritic, volcanic glass, dunite, alkali anorthosites, and granite. Much of this data has been gathered from the Apollo and Lunar Prospector missions, and the rock samples brought back from the moon by the astronauts.

The moon is believed to consist of a small, iron-rich core surrounded by a differentiated crust (Lee, Halliday, Snyder and Taylor, 1997, 1098). The evidence for an iron core

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