The Genesis Rock is a sample of Moon rock retrieved by Apollo 15 astronauts James Irwin and David Scott in 1971 during their second lunar EVA. It is currently stored at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility in Houston, Texas.
Chemical analysis of the Genesis Rock indicated it is an anorthosite, composed mostly of the plagioclase feldspar, anorthite. The rock was formed in the early stages of the solar system, at least 4 billion years ago. It was recovered in a crater of the Moon, near other rocks of its kind.
It was originally thought they had found a piece of the Moon's primordial crust, but later analysis initially showed that the rock was only 4.1 ± 0.1 billion years old, which is younger than the Moon itself; and was formed after the Moon's crust solidified. But it was still an extremely old sample, and was from the Pre-Nectarian. Dating of pyroxenes from other anorthosite samples gave a samarium-neodymium age of crystallization of 4.46 billion years.
The solar system was formed only around 100 million years earlier.
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