* Astronomy

Lunar meteorite Kalahari 009 contains fragments of basalt about 4.35 billion years old, a record-breaking old age for mare basalt.
Photogeologic and remote sensing studies of the Moon show that many light-coloured, smooth areas in the highlands contain craters surrounded by dark piles of excavated debris. The dark deposits resemble the dark basalts that make up the lunar maria. They contain the same diagnostic minerals (especially high-calcium pyroxene) and chemical compositions (high iron oxide) as do mare basalts. The deposits formed when vast amounts of material ejected during the formation of giant impact basins covered pre-existing lava plains. Since the smooth plains are older than the youngest impact basin (about 3.8 billion years old), the lavas must have erupted before formation of the visible maria. In fact, they were visible maria for a while eons ago, but were buried by ejecta when the basins formed.

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The plains of solidified lava that give the moon its quirky human-like face as seen from earth were created more than four billion years ago, according to a paper appearing tomorrow in Nature, the British science weekly.
The evidence comes from an unearthly silvery-grey stone that was blasted off the face of the moon, perhaps by an impacting asteroid, and then captured by Earth's gravity, prompting it to fall to ground in Botswana.
In 1999, the 13.5kg remnant of this roving rock was found by local people near the village of Kuke, in the grasslands of the Kalahari Nature Reserve, who sold it to meteorite hunters.

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