Rocks from the Apollo missions showed how the moon was made. Now they’re about to solve more mysteries.
Lunar samples 15556, 60015 and 70017 in a stainless-steel processing cabinet that contains a nearly pure nitrogen atmosphere at Johnson Space Center in Houston. By Sarah Kaplan Sarah Kaplan Reporter for Speaking of Science Email Bio Follow May 12 at 8:12 PM HOUSTON — The first person to set foot on the moon had one last task before he came home.
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. A sophisticated HVAC system, designed to keep the air 1,000 times cleaner than in the outside world, fills the facility with a faint artificial breeze. Scientists enter only after donning special white jumpsuits, caps and booties to limit contamination.
At some point, Wood reasoned, the moon must have been completely covered in a magma ocean, in which anorthosite rocks floated like icebergs. The molten world would have cast an eerie, blood-red glow in Earth’s night skies. A large sample of moon rock. That sample came to be known as “the Genesis rock” — a nod to the role it played in helping scientists unravel the story of the moon’s origins. It sits inside its own glass case, not far from the dish containing Armstrong’s soil.About 4.5 billion years ago, the theory goes, a long-gone giant planet called Theia, named for the mother of the Greek moon goddess, smashed into the newly formed Earth.
Lunar dust and soil samples collected at the end of the Apollo 11 mission by Neil Armstrong. Other rocks have helped us “see beyond the moon” to the history of the whole solar system, Zeigler said. Most of Earth’s geologic record has been weathered by water and wind or swallowed up by plate tectonics, but the moon’s surface still bears the scars of every volcano that ever erupted and every meteor that ever crashed into it.
Some measurements, like the analysis of the captured gas, can only be made at the moment the canisters are opened. Scientists will spend months rehearsing the experiment on practice tubes containing samples from Antarctica before the big event.
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