What's New on the Moon?

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

 French reports that we have Moon rocks collected from eight different places on the Moon. The six Apollo landings: 382 kilograms (843 pounds) and 2,000 separate samples. Two Soviet spacecraft named Luna-16 and Luna-20 returned 130 grams (five ounces). Instruments placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts as long ago as 1969 are still detecting moon-quakes and meteorite impacts, measuring the Moon's motions, and recording the heat flowing out from inside the Moon. The Apollo Program also carried out a major effort of photographing and analyzing the surface of the Moon. Cameras on the Apollo spacecraft obtained so many accurate photographs that we now have better maps of parts of the Moon than we do for some areas on Earth. Special detectors near the cameras measured the weak X-rays and radioactivity given off by the lunar surface. From these measurements, we have been able to determine the chemical composition of about one-quarter of the Moon's surface, an area the size of the United States and Mexico combined. By comparing the flight data with analyses of returned Moon rocks, we can draw conclusions about the chemical composition and nature of the entire Moon.

The lunar soil is something entirely new to scientists, for it could only have been formed on the surface of an airless body like the Moon. The soil has been built up over billions of years by the continuous bombardment of the unprotected Moon by large and small meteorites, most of which would have burned up if they had entered the Earth's atmosphere.

These meteorites form craters when they hit the Moon. Tiny particles of cosmic dust produce microscopic craters perhaps 1/1000 of a millimeter (1/25,000 inch) across, while the rare impact of a large body may blasts out a crater many kilometers, or miles, in diameter. Each of these impacts shatters the solid rock, scatters material around the crater, and stirs and mixes the soil. As a result, the lunar soil is a well-mixed sample of a large area of the Moon, and single samples of lunar soil have yielded rock fragments whose source was hundreds of kilometers from the collection site. However, the lunar soil is more than ground-up and reworked lunar rock. It is the boundary layer between the Moon and outer space, and it absorbs the matter and energy that strikes the Moon fro the Sun and the rest of the universe. Tiny bits of cosmic dust and high-energy atomic particles that would be stopped high in the Earth's protective atmosphere rain continually onto the surface of the Moon.

Although the Apollo Program officially ended in 1972, the active study of the Moon goes on. More than 125 teams of scientists are studying the returned lunar samples and analyzing the information that continues to come from the instruments on the Moon. Less than 10 percent of the lunar sample material has yet been studied in detail, and more results will emerge as new rocks and soil samples are examined.The scientific results of the Apollo Program have spread far beyond the Moon itself. By studying the Moon, we have learned how to go about the business of exploring other planets. The Apollo Program proved that we could apply to another world the methods that we have used to learn about the Earth. Now the knowledge gained from the Moon is being used with the photographs returned by Mariner 9 and 10 to understand the histories of Mercury and Mars and to interpret the data returned by the Viking mission to Mars.

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