By Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com The moon — linked in myth with
goddesses of witchcraft and the hunt, with gods of magic and
wisdom — is nearly as old as Earth itself, with enigmas of its
own. As close as the moon is to Earth, we are still far from
solving all its mysteries — from how the moon was born to
whether life on Earth has its past and future there. How was the
moon made? Most scientists think the moon was born from a
gargantuan collision — when a young, 30-million-year-old Earth
was sideswiped by an embryonic planet the size of Mars some 4.5
billion years ago, with debris from our planet and this impactor
eventually coalescing into a molten, red-hot moon. Curiously,
while the latest computer models suggest most of the moon came
from the impactor, lunar samples from the Apollo and other
missions suggest the moon is very chemically similar to Earth's
mantle. "Perhaps that means the impactor, this embryonic planet,
was similar to Earth, drawn from the same materials our planet
was," said Bernard Foing, pri