Moon's Deepest Rocks May Be Lying on the Surface — Right Where Artemis Plans to Land

The Moon has been keeping a secret for billions of years, and future astronauts may be able to simply walk up and pick it up. New research published via Science Daily reveals that the colossal impact that formed the South Pole-Aitken basin — the Moon's largest and oldest crater, stretching roughly 2,500 kilometers across — didn't just gouge out the surface. Simulations of the strike show that a large, iron-cored impactor hitting at a low angle blasted material from the lunar mantle outward, scattering it across the southern polar region where NASA's Artemis program is targeting its crewed landings. This matters enormously. Mantle rocks are the geological equivalent of a time capsule — pristine material from the Moon's interior that has never been processed by the surface environment. Until now, scientists assumed reaching such samples would require deep drilling or robotic excavation missions of extraordinary complexity. Instead, the physics of one ancient catastrophic impact may have done the work for us, leaving those rocks exposed and accessible on terrain future astronauts could traverse on foot. The South Pole-Aitken basin is already considered one of the most scientifically valuable destinations in the solar system — it's ancient enough to hold records of the early bombardment era and deep enough to have punched through the crust. The new finding layers an additional prize on top: if the simulation holds, astronauts won't just be exploring a crater. They'll be walking through a geological library whose oldest volumes were written in the Moon's interior, billions of years before Earth had complex life. For the Artemis program, this is the kind of scientific context that transforms a mission objective. Every sample collected near the South Pole just became potentially more significant. Researchers can now direct crews toward specific geological targets with a clearer model of what they're looking at — and what it might tell us about how the Moon, and by extension the early Earth-Moon system, was assembled in the first place.