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."

Comments

Re:Mars missions

[Ford Prefect]

Even if I could only see a marsrock in the Smithsonian, it would make me feel so much closer to the Red Planet.

No idea about the Smithsonian, but I've already seen Mars rock - at the Natural History Museum in London.

Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!

Andromeda Strain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in the photo labs at Johnson Space Center (Nasa Houston) back in 1972 and was told that when Apollo 11 returned, Nasa had the Lunar Receiving Laboratory set up like a Fort Dietrich style germ warfare lab. Apparently there was actually concern that the rocks could harbor harmful microbes. This may have all been an urban legend of the time - I'm not sure. In any case, the photo techs thought this was pretty funny, since the boxes that the Hasselblad film cassettes were returned in were full of moon dust and it stuck to everything.