According to images taken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon, the space body may have experienced volcanic eruptions as recently as 50 to 100 million years ago.

LRO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, John Keller, said, "This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon".

Astronauts of Apollo 15, the ninth manned mission in the United States' Apollo program, had taken images of strange volcanic deposit known as Ina, while orbiting around the moon. According to scientists, the strange volcanic deposit was young and volcanic activity must be responsible for the formation of it. As most of the volcanic activities occurred between 3.5 billion years ago and 1 billion years ago, scientists believed that Ina must have formed during that time.

With the help of new images by LRO spacecraft, scientists have marked about 70 similar patches in the dark volcanic plains on moon's side that faces earth.

These distinctive patches are widely distributed on the moon. According to scientists, the distribution of these patches showed that moon must have experienced volcanic activity not so long ago. Three of distinctive rock deposits are supposed to be less than 100 million years old, and Ina would have formed about 50 million years ago, scientists reported.

The scientists said that they had linked crater measurements to the ages of moon dirt samples with the help of a technique. The dirt samples were taken during Soviet Union's robotic Luna missions and Apollo missions. The details of the research were published online on October 12 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The finding of deposits could help scientists in knowing more about temperature of the moon's interior.