Apollo 17 lunar samples are yielding new discoveries. New analysis of lunar material brought back by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 suggests that the Moon may be 40 million years older than we thought. Researchers studied a sample of zircon in the Moon rocks, a mineral that would have been the first solid to form when the Moon’s surface solidified. The team established the age of the zircon as 4.46 billion years, older than the previous estimate of the Moon’s age, which was 4.42 billion years. Pictured: Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt collecting Moon rocks. Image credit: NASA.

The University of California and NASA Ames are planning to build a new space center. The Berkeley Space Center campus will be built at the University of California, Berkeley, in Mountain View, California. Its purpose will be to house research and development facilities for the university and private partners, focusing on space robotics, remote sensing, planetary sciences, climate change, electric aviation, mixed autonomy traffic operations, and firefighting.