Cache of moon samples to be unsealed for study
Later this year, NASA will reveal never-before-seen morsels of the moon, the agency announced recently.
The astronauts of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon from 1969 to 1972 collected 842 pounds worth of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust. Many of those samples were later opened on the ground. But three have remained sealed — their contents stashed away for nearly 50 years.
They were intentionally saved for a time when more advanced technology would allow planetary scientists on Earth to delve deeper into the moon’s mysteries.
“The technology available in the ‘60s and ‘70s wasn’t able to do what we can do now,” said Jessica Barnes, an astronomer soon to join the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “Now we can go to a mineral and we can look at the very fine details, down to almost the width of a human hair.”
In a year marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and with U.S. space priorities shifting toward a return to the moon, NASA has at last decided that it’s time to open the long-locked samples. The agency selected nine teams to study the moon rocks in detail.
For the past decade, Charles Shearer, a scientist at the University of New Mexico, has pressed NASA to unseal the rocks. He was thrilled by the news: “We are completing the Apollo mission adventure after 50 years, using new types of measurements and new views of our moon.”
Darby Dyar, a scientist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, agreed. She first studied lunar samples in 1979, as an undergraduate, and has come full circle as a leader of one of the selected teams.
Dyar and her colleagues will scour materials from Apollo 15, 16 and 17, searching for yellow, orange and green glass beads roughly the size of a grain of salt. Those beads formed when the droplets within fire fountains — picture an Old Faithful of lava — hit the lunar atmosphere and cooled.
“Imagine spraying a squirt gun of hot lava,” Dyar said. “Because the droplets are so tiny, they cool immediately.”
And those cooled droplets, or glass beads, are a treasure trove for scientists. They provide a window into the interior of the moon and could answer fundamental questions about how our nearest neighbor evolved.
The moon’s history is a common theme in many of the selected projects. Kees Welten, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his team will study a core collected by Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan, the Apollo 17 astronauts, in order to better gauge the impact history of the moon. That can be used as a proxy for other planets in the solar system (including Earth) whose craters longago disappeared.