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China Focus: Chinese scientists discover new lunar mineral
Chinese scientists have discovered a new lunar mineral through research on the samples retrieved from the Moon by China's Chang'e-5 mission, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the China Atomic Energy Authority (CAEA) jointly announced Friday (Sep 9), according to the Xinhua.
This is the first new mineral discovered on the Moon by China and the sixth by humankind.
It was discovered from an analysis of lunar basalt particles by a research team from the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology (BRIUG), a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation.
The new finding makes China the third country in the world to have discovered a new mineral on the Moon, said Dong Baotong, deputy director of the CAEA.
The new mineral has been named Changesite-(Y), Dong said in a statement. It is a kind of colorless transparent columnar crystal.
It added that Changesite-(Y) is a phosphate mineral in columnar crystal found in lunar basalt particles.
It took the researchers eight hours to cut the new mineral particle away from other minerals.
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In addition to finding the new mineral, the researchers of BRIUG have, for the first time, determined the concentration of Helium-3 from lunar soil samples and its extraction parameters, providing fundamental scientific data for lunar resource evaluation and exploration.
Earlier, the US and the former Soviet Union had announced discoveries of new minerals on the moon's surface.
levantnews-xinhua
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