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![\"EarthSnap\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/earthsnap-banner-news.webp\")
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The meteorite, named NWA 12593, came from the Moon, blasted into space, and later dropped onto our planet. <\/p>\n
Carolyn Crow, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder<\/a>), led the team that analyzed the history of NWA 12593.<\/p>\n A lunar<\/a> meteorite like this one is a rare delivery. Inside the single stone, Crow\u2019s team found fingerprints of three separate collisions from three different moments. <\/p>\n One rock held traces of three catastrophes. The oldest event left the deepest mark. <\/p>\n By measuring the slow decay of radioactive elements locked in the rock\u2019s minerals, the researchers dated it to roughly 3.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n The first impact melted the surface<\/p>\n That ancient impact hit hard enough to melt the Moon\u2019s surface into a glowing sheet of molten rock that pooled and spread before freezing solid. <\/p>\n This was no glancing blow. The energy dwarfs anything in human history.<\/p>\n Tracing that heat leads to a mineral called cubic zirconia<\/a>, the same material jewelers grow in labs as a cheap stand-in for diamonds. In nature, it forms only under ferocious heat, then breaks down as the rock cools.<\/p>\n The mineral itself is long gone from NWA 12593. What remains is its ghost. Crystals in the sample still carry an internal structure that could only exist if cubic zirconia had formed there.<\/p>\n Second strike fused rubble<\/p>\n The second collision is written into the meteorite\u2019s texture. NWA 12593 is a breccia, meaning a stone built from broken, angular fragments welded into one piece by an impact\u2019s force and heat.<\/p>\n Long after that melt sheet hardened, a smaller strike shattered it. The blast mixed chunks of different rocks into one fused mass, a texture Crow compares to a chipped-out piece of sidewalk concrete.<\/p>\n Each fragment inside the stone came from a different patch of lunar ground. Packed together, they let one small sample stand in for far more of the Moon\u2019s surface than a single landing site could.<\/p>\n The third blast reached Earth<\/p>\n Evidence for the third impact is simpler. The rock is here. Something struck the Moon again, far more recently, and threw this chunk of breccia hard enough to escape lunar gravity.<\/p>\n After a long spell adrift, the fragment crossed paths with Earth and fell into the desert. Collectors found it in northwest Africa \u2013 the source of the catalog name NWA 12593.<\/p>\n Rocks like this are precious because Earth keeps erasing its own past, with erosion and drifting tectonic plates recycling the surface. <\/p>\n One paper<\/a> proposes that lunar evidence is proof the inner solar system took a beating around 3.9 billion years ago.<\/p>\n The Moon faces no such housekeeping. With no weather and no restless crust, its scars stay put for billions of years. <\/p>\n This is why scientists read lunar rocks to learn about Earth\u2019s violent youth.<\/p>\n Three records that line up<\/p>\n The same blows survive on Earth in ancient rock layers, and a detailed review<\/a> traces the run of large strikes geologists have pieced together. The lunar date now drops straight into that sequence.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty rare to have all three records line up like this,\u201d said Crow.<\/p>\n Matching impact ages across three separate worlds almost never happens. Until now, the lunar piece of that puzzle was the weak link.<\/p>\n The third partner in the match is 4 Vesta<\/a>, the fourth-largest body in the asteroid belt. Its scarred surface records collisions from the same era. Earth, the Moon, and 4 Vesta now line up three for three.<\/p>\n Why the timing matters<\/p>\n On Earth, 3.5 billion years ago is a landmark for biologists. <\/p>\n Fossil traces from that era, including those in a study<\/a> of ancient Australian hot spring deposits, rank among the earliest known signs of life.<\/p>\n Life was getting its start while big rocks were still falling. Crow argues that the pace of those catastrophes belongs in any account of how life took hold. <\/p>\n Each impact could rearrange a young planet\u2019s surface and stir its seas. The new lunar date lands squarely in that window. <\/p>\n It shows the bombardment did not fade quietly once the planets finished forming. Large collisions kept coming for hundreds of millions of years, right into life\u2019s first chapters.<\/p>\n Future research directions<\/p>\n Scientists now know the Moon took a giant impact about 3.5 billion years ago, in the same stretch when Earth and 4 Vesta were also being hit. <\/p>\n No lunar sample had pinned that three-way match before this one. It changes what researchers can do next. <\/p>\n Impact ages from future Moon missions and other desert meteorites can be tested against the same pattern, and geologists hunting Earth\u2019s oldest craters know which window to examine.<\/p>\n The study also hands biologists something concrete. Anyone modeling how early life survived its first billion years can now work with real dates for when the heaviest blows landed. <\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Geology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Find a meteorite in the desert and the odds say it came from an asteroid drifting between Mars…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-477315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}