What a blast from the past!
I discovered something quite special today.
Private collectors cannot legally obtain rocks brought back by Apollo, so we have to turn to mother nature.
This is a complete section of lunar rock dislodged from the moon’s gravity (by a meteoroid hitting the moon) which then, by good luck, slammed into Morocco.
The origin of this rock can be determined by chemical analysis, not just to the moon, but to a likely region of the moon.
Most meteorites on Earth are from the asteroid belt — 94% of those are stony and plain, 6% are iron-nickel with crystalline structure unobtainable on Earth.
Of over 50,000 meteorites recorded, only 0.1% have been documented as lunar, and of those, many come from the dark side of the moon, where most impact events have occurred recently (lacking the Earth as a shield), and where humanity has never visited.
So what makes this lunar rock even more special, is that it comes from the Earth-facing side of the moon, and from its chemical composition, it is lunar feldspathic impact-melt breccia that matches the Apollo 16 samples.
Washington U summarizes: “It is the only lunar meteorite to be compositionally similar to soil from the Apollo 16 site.”
So I am excited to pair this with another item brought back from the moon from the Apollo 16 site, the Lunar Module COAS.
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