09/18/2025
🌙🪨 Big Bertha: The Moon Rock That May Have Begun on Earth
On February 6, 1971, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard spotted an unusual boulder near Cone Crater during his lunar walk. “There’s a football-size rock, Houston, coming out of this area…” he reported, as he and fellow astronaut Edgar Mitchell carefully wrestled it into their collection bag despite the challenges of moving in heavy space suits.
This massive specimen — weighing nearly 20 pounds — was nicknamed “Big Bertha.” It became the largest rock brought back from Apollo 14, and the third-largest collected from the Moon overall. At the time, NASA scientists prized it as a “treasure chest” of ancient lunar fragments fused together nearly 3.9 billion years ago by violent impacts.
✨ But new research suggests Big Bertha may carry a deeper secret.
A team led by Jeremy Bellucci and Prof. Alexander Nemchin at the Swedish Museum of Natural History discovered something striking about one clast (fragment) inside the rock. Using advanced analysis, they found it formed under conditions — cooler temperatures and higher oxygen levels — more typical of Earth’s crust than the Moon’s volcanic environment.
This points to a remarkable possibility: Big Bertha may contain a 4-billion-year-old piece of Earth’s crust, blasted into space by a colossal asteroid impact during the Solar System’s chaotic early days. At that time, the Moon orbited three times closer to Earth, making such an interplanetary journey possible. The fragment then became embedded in lunar rock after another huge impact that created the Imbrium Basin, one of the largest craters on the Moon.
🌌 If true, this makes the clast inside Big Bertha one of the oldest Earth rocks ever found — and it was discovered not on Earth, but on the Moon.
“This extraordinary find helps paint a better picture of early Earth and the bombardment that shaped our planet during the dawn of life,” explains Dr. David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, part of the research team.
Big Bertha reminds us that the story of the Moon is also the story of Earth — and that sometimes, the most ancient fragments of our home can be found far beyond it. 🌍➡️🌙
📸 Credit: NASA
