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Moon Rocks Still In Demand After Almost 40 Years
During NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, roughly 842 pounds of rocks were collected from the lunar surface. Scientific demand for the rocks has always been high, and a review board tracks and sends out hundreds of samples each year, even now, decades after the rocks were brought to Earth. They've provided researchers with a wealth of information about the entire solar system. From the NYTimes:
"The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon's topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of fine-grained soil and dust -- known as regolith -- that now cloaks the lunar surface. And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system's youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and erosion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets."
When we go go back: Take a shovel and bucket.
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I have touched Mars. Repeatedly.
Tucked away in a tiny corner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, ignored by most visitors, is a small display of a tiny rock.
You can touch this rock.
The description of the rock states that it is a meteorite from Mars that was collected in Antarctica.
Even though the surface of earth changes, but I dont thing the stuff (rocks etc) just disappear. They still remain on earth. So, why can't they be used to find anything about the universe?
Mainly because bits of the surface are constantly being subducted into the core of the earth and melting into the general magma soup. The entire surface is also constantly subjected to erosion and weathering, which breaks rock down both physically and chemically. They are slow processes, but we're talking about ~4.5 billion years. That is enough time for pretty well the entire surface of the earth to have been destroyed and reformed several times over.
A sample from the moon is largely an unaltered and uncontaminated record from the moment it first solidified as rock.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
some of the NYT comments are worse. The guy touted a lunar sample mission by the Russians and they certainly didn't bring any lunar rocks back during the height of the space race and quite honestly I don't think anyone has brought anything back since the astronauts picked them and returned them.
Some of the other stuff, too, is the claim that 800 lbs of lunar geology is enough to tell the story of the moon. We still get cannot get the earth's story straight, geologically speaking, and we're standing on the samples! There's been no systematic mineral assay, no samples in the mountains, no samples in the big caves thought to be on the moon, no samples from the polar regions and really, not much at all.
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