This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The Apollo missions brought back 842 pounds of rock and soil from the moon,

nearly 2,200 different samples.

But there's one sample that planetary scientists Minakshi Wadwa says is the most interesting

of all.

Apollo 10085.

Neil Armstrong collected it on Apollo 11.

He was about to step back into the lunar module and he turned around and just,

he had this rock box and he saw little spaces, you know, in there,

and he knew that these geologists on Earth would be just so excited to study these materials.

He just scooped up, I think nine scoops of soil that he put into the box.

And it became one of the most well-studied samples of the Apollo missions, she says.

A geologist named John Wood at the Smithsonian noticed white flecks of rock in the soil,

which he identified as a rock type called

anorthosite, and it clued him into the moon's ancient past.

And it's just, you know, it's quite a leap of imagination, but he proposed that

the whole of the moon had at one time in the past, you know, somewhere close to four and a half

billion years ago, been almost covered with a global magma ocean, you know, ocean of lava.

And so this was a revolutionary idea at the time

because people had thought that the moon had formed cold.

And so it completely changed their idea about how the moon formed,

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