The first Chinese mission to softly land on the surface of the moon has discovered a new kind of volcanic moon rock.

This finding marks the first time in about 40 years that a new discovery has confirmed from the surface of the moon.

The rock samples were taken from Chang'e-3's landing site in the Imbrium basin — a dark impact site filled with hardened lava that can be seen from Earth, according to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, one of the organizations that analyzed the data beamed back from the mission.

China's Chang'e-3 lander launched to the moon's surface in 2013 and deployed the Yutu rover — the robot responsible for this new discovery — shortly afterwards. The rover has been immobile for some time, though was still sending pings to Earth as late as October of 2015, China's state-run Xinhua news agency said.

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The rocks from the Imbrium basin are basaltic and appear to be compositionally different from the moon rocks brought back to Earth during the Apollo missions or the Soviet Union's Luna sample returns, a new study in the journal Nature Communications suggests.

“The diversity tells us that the moon’s upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth’s,” Washington University's Bradley Jolliff, an author of the new study, said in a statement.

“And correlating chemistry with age, we can see how the moon’s volcanism changed over time.”

Lava on the moon

Scientists think the moon formed when a large body (about the size of Mars) slammed into Earth, expelling debris from the nascent planet and forming the moon. Eventually, the moon's interior separated out into a crust, mantle and core, with radioactivity in the mantle causing volcanic eruptions about 500 million years after the lunar body formed.

The lava from those eruptions spilled out on the moon's surface, according to a University of Washington statement, pooling in basins like the one Chang'e-3 landed within.

The Apollo and Luna missions analyzed basaltic rock formed during the "peak" of volcanic activity from 3 billion to 4 billions years ago, but researchers think that Yutu's basalts are younger, at about 3 billion-years-old, filling in a little more of the moon's rich history.

These results, some of the first published since the rover began exploring the moon, also show how valuable the Chang'e-3 mission is in general.

"I was just really glad to see results coming from the mission," Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, told Mashable in an interview.

"It tells you that everything worked well with the instruments and gives you some confidence that there will be more to come also." Petro was not involved in the new study.

Although the rover has gone silent, there is likely more data that has already been transmitted to Earth for analysis.

Confirming a lunar orbiter's measurements

Scientists had some sense that this young basalt was present in Yutu's neighborhood even before the rover got there, but this finding is the first direct confirmation of the special rocks.

The rocks themselves have an "intermediate" amount of titanium versus the Apollo or Luna samples, which have either very high or very low amounts of the element, according to the Washington University press release. By piecing together the titanium composition of certain rocks, scientists can potentially create a timeline showing when the oceans of magma on the surface of the moon solidified.

Remote sensing data — research collected from lunar orbit — suggested that the basalts Yutu sampled would be "distinct" from others, Petro said, but Yutu's direct confirmation and characterization of them will help with any future research that pieces together the body's volcanic history.

There are relatively few missions that have directly sampled the lunar dirt, so having another data point can add to our understanding of the moon, Petro said.

While this new finding may not revolutionize our understanding of the moon's history, it does give researchers a much clearer understanding of how this particular part of the moon developed over the years. It's also possible to extrapolate this finding out to other parts of the lunar surface that look similar to the Imbrium basin, giving scientists a a more complete view of the moon's geology.

“We now have ‘ground truth’ for our remote sensing, a well-characterized sample in a key location,” Jolliff said. “We see the same signal from orbit in other places, so we now know that those other places probably have similar basalts.”