DAY IN SUN FOR MOON ROCKS
New analysis of Apollo 11 lunar samples set
HOUSTON — The first person to set foot on the moon had one last task before he came home.
Neil Armstrong needed to pick up rocks — as many as he could carry, as interesting as he could find. The material he collected would constitute humanity’s first samples taken from another world.
With less than 10 minutes of his walk left, Armstrong piled about 20 rocks into a special collection box, then added 13 pounds of lunar soil.
Today, a tablespoon of that soil sits in a sealed dish in a locked and windowless lab at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It is a prized piece of the Apollo program’s greatest scientific legacy: nearly 850 pounds of moon rocks.
For 50 years, research on these rocks has transformed our understanding of the moon, revealing the circumstances of its birth and the reasons for its mottled face. Now, NASA has decided to release three new samples for analysis — samples that no scientist has touched.
The experiments, on vacuum-sealed cores and a long-frozen rock, can be performed only once, at the precise moment the samples are opened. That’s why the materials have been held back since they were retrieved from the moon, said Ryan Zeigler, who curates the Apollo rocks collection. NASA was waiting for the right scientists, the right technology and the right time.
With Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary this year, Zeigler said, the right time is now.
NASA’s Lunar Sample Laboratory, a maze of gleaming metal cabinets and spotless linoleum floors, was built in the 1970s to house the rocks brought back from six moon missions. An HVAC system, designed to keep the air 1,000 times cleaner than in the outside world, fills the facility with a faint breeze.
These are some of the most valuable rocks in the solar system, Zeigler said. Just look at what they have revealed.
Before the Apollo 11 mission, scientists couldn’t agree on where the moon came from. It’s a misfit in the solar system — much larger relative to its planet than almost any other moon. Some thought it was an object “captured” by Earth’s gravity. Others proposed the satellite formed in orbit alongside Earth when the planets were coalescing out of a primordial dust disc. Textbooks taught that it was a blob of Earth that had been flung away.
Those theories had to be discarded as soon as scientists saw the first Apollo rocks.
The moon materials were as old as 4.5 billion years. Although they contained many of the same chemicals as rocks from Earth, they were poor in molecules like water and carbon dioxide that easily vaporize when heated. Some had features produced only in showers of meteorites, blasts from volcanoes, or barrages of particles from the sun.
Studying material from the moon up close hasn’t fully explained its history. For one, researchers can find no molecular fingerprints of Theia — the object whose collision with Earth purportedly created the moon. Nor can scientists agree on how traces of water wound up inside the samples, when the global magma ocean should have boiled it all away.
NASA hopes the samples will hold some answers.
“It’s exciting to open up something new,” said Barbara Cohen, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who will lead the gas analysis. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”