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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."
I can't wait for the first samples from Mars to be returned, though at this rate I'll be a grey old man. I've always loved the description of the planetary landscape in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars , especially his account of how astronauts would have to deal with "fines" (ultra-small dust particles that seep everywhere). Even if I could only see a marsrock in the Smithsonian, it would make me feel so much closer to the Red Planet.
Too bad they're all fakes picked up from the driveway outside a soundstage in southern california. All those so called "scientists" and "NASA" will look so silly once people actually make it to the moon and find that it really is made of cheese. Demand for the gourmet "moon cheese" will cause overmining of the moon and an eventual orbital shift sometime in 2012 which will cause all female mammals on earth to have a massively synchronized ovulatory cycle which will end with the death of all the males.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
When we go go back: Take a shovel and bucket.
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You might want to look up "plate tectonics".
We really should stop outsourcing dirt from other planets to fill out dirt needs. Think of the economy!
It's not rock... it's fossilized whalebone.
You mean compared to the 5.9736 × 10^24 kg of Earth?
Who'da thunk it?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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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"By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets.""
So true. Even when John McCain was a kid, he could look up in the night sky and see the moon.
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One word: volcanism.
The Earth has it, the moon does not.
Elementary geology tell us that the composition and structure of the rocks changes when it undergoes igneous or metamorphic transformations, meaning we can not trust anything that we can reach to be in its "original" state. If nothing we can access on Earth is guaranteed to be "original", then no, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the origins of the Universe.
The moon, on the other hand, is pretty much the same as it was when it first formed (save for the changes caused by impacts and radiation), making it a much more reliable record of "how things were."
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.
They are the only way that I know of to successfully get the Avatar to Britania and back.
Loonie is perfectly good variant of English, tovarisch.
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man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
It's a matter of scale. When you're dealing with 4-5 billion years, what's 20 million years? 0.5% error margin sounds quite good to me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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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A little-known fact: It is against Federal law for a private citizen to own any piece of a legitimate moon rock. If you own one (or have bought one), you are required by law to contact NASA immediately and hand it over; without delay.