For more than half a century, scientists pictured the Moon as an almost fully reduced world where iron stayed locked in low-oxygen states. That idea came from Apollo samples, which showed that solar ...

Tiny iron oxide grains found in lunar soil samples brought by the Chinese Chang’e-6 mission upend what was known about the Moon’s surface and magnetic properties, scientists revealed in a new study.

In 2020, scientists reported the detection of hematite, an iron oxide mineral otherwise known as rust, distributed through the higher latitudes of the moon, particularly on the nearside. This came as ...