The first Chinese mission that has made a soft landing on the moon’s surface has found a new type of volcanic moon rock. The discovery has marked the first time in nearly 4 decades that a new finding has got confirmation from the surface of the moon.

As per Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, which is among the organizations that analyzed the data that has been received from the mission, the collection of rock samples was done from Chang'e-3's landing area in the Imbrium basin. The Imbrium basin is a dark impact site packed with hardened lava that is visible from our planet.

In 2013, China's Chang'e-3 lander launched to the surface of the moon and shortly afterwards deployed the Yutu rover, which is responsible for this latest discovery. China's state-run Xinhua news agency said that for some time the rover was immobile, though was still transferring pings to Earth as late as October this year.

A latest study in the journal Nature Communications has suggested that the rocks from the Imbrium basin were basaltic and seems to be compositionally varied from the moon rocks that were brought back to our planet at the time of the Apollo missions or the Soviet Union's Luna sample returns.

In a statement, Washington University's Bradley Jolliff, an author of the new study, said, “The diversity tells us that the moon’s upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth’s. And correlating chemistry with age, we can see how the moon’s volcanism changed over time”.

In a statement provided to Gizmodo News,A team of scientists has finished analyzing rocks collected by the Chinese lunar rover Yutu in 2013 — the first geologic sampling effort to hit the Moon in forty years. The regolith is unlike any we’ve seen before, and it suggests that the Moon’s history is far more complex than we realized.

The 1970s were the heyday of lunar geologic studies, with both the American Apollo (1969-1972) and Russian Luna (1970-1976) missions collecting and analyzing samples. Since then, we’ve continued to study the Moon’s surface from afar, using remote orbiters. Only in the past few years has the Chinese space program begun to pick up the “ground work”—and its efforts reveal how much we still have to learn about Earth’s nearest neighbor.

In other news EurekAlert reported, In 2013, Chang'e-3, an unmanned lunar mission, touched down on the northern part of the Imbrium basin, one of the most prominent of the lava-filled impact basins visible from Earth.

It was a beautiful landing site, said Bradley L. Jolliff, PhD, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who is a participant in an educational collaboration that helped analyze Chang'e-3 mission data. The lander touched down on a smooth flood basalt plain next to a relatively fresh impact crater (now officially named the Zi Wei crater) that had conveniently excavated bedrock from below the regolith for the Yutu rover to study.

According to a report from the PopularMechanics, Thomas Watters, a planetary scientist with the Smithsonian Institution and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, notes that humanity has explored precious little of the moon's surface. Therefore, he says, "it's not terribly surprising that [Ling and his colleagues] found a type of basalt that had not been seen or sampled before—but I think it's nonetheless significant. This type of find improves the picture we can paint of the moon's evolutionary history. The moon still has a lot of surprises. I think it's fair to say we really don't understand the moon nearly as well as many people may think. Maybe even less than we thought we did just 10 years ago."