3.9-billion-year-old moon rock on display in the Oval Office

A 3.9-billion-year-old lunar rock brought back from the Moon by the Apollo 17 mission crew is now on display inside the White House's Oval Office at the request of Biden Administration. 

The small boulder held by a metal clamp and encased in glass sits located on a bookshelf that features items intended to remind Americans of the ambition and accomplishments of earlier generations, reports Daily Mail. 

NASA loaned the moon rock from its Lunar, from the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

At the base of the structure is an inscription dedicated to the three men of the Apollo 17 mission, which was the last NASA astronauts to walk across the lunar surface.

"Apollo 17 astronaut Ronald Evans and moonwalkers Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the Moon, chipped this sample from a large boulder at the base of the North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, 3 km (almost 2 miles) from the Lunar Module," the inscription on the base reads.

According to the inscription, the rock formed 3.9 billion years ago during the last large impact event on the nearside of the Moon, the Imbrium Impact Basin, which is 1,145 km or 711.5 miles in diameter.

The moon rock features a number of tiny craters formed by micrometeorite impacts that have blasted it for over millions of years.

There is also a flat side of the sample that was created in NASA's Lunar Curation Laboratory when slices were cut for scientific research.

President Joe Biden is the first president to request this specific sample, but it is the second to take a place in the White House.

In 1999, former President Bill Clinton invited the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, to the White House in honour of NASA's 30th anniversary of the first moon landing and was loaned lunar sample 10057,30 – a moon rock taken during the 1969 mission.