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.

17 responses to “Moon rock from the Apollo 16 site”

  1. saxxon57 Avatar
    saxxon57

    Nice finding, so rare.

    Reply
  2. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    This puppy is the © outlier that matches the Apollo 16 site:

    Apollo 16 site

    P.S. There’s a good lunar meteorite primer and FAQ here.

    Reply
  3. jimheid Avatar
    jimheid

    It’s beautiful! What a magnificent find.

    Reply
  4. Dr DAD (Daniel A D'Auria MD) Avatar
    Dr DAD (Daniel A D’Auria MD)

    Definitely a wonderful addition to the collection. I have to wonder, however, if we can be that certain about the area of origin and composition of lunar rock when we have visited so little of it. Either way, just the fact that it is lunar in origin is intriguing. Have a great Thanksgiving!

    Reply
  5. Spaceaholic.com Avatar
    Spaceaholic.com

    Depending on when the impact occurred , this may not have originated from the then Earth facing-side. While the moon is now tidally locked that was not always the case (several billion years ago the Moon rotated faster then its orbital period around our planet).

    If you have some free time, might be worthwhile perusing the JSC Lunar Sample Compendium at the Astromaterials and Curation Office (formally the Lunar Receiving Lab during the Apollo days) to compare images of returned specimens with your breccia: curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/compendium.cfm

    Reply
  6. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Cool structure, pretty:)

    Reply
  7. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    thanks!
    and thanks for the great info spaceaholic!
    Dr.D – can’t tell with certainly. All of the Apollo sample collection missions landed in the central nearside of the Moon, an area that has subsequently been shown to be geochemically anomalous by the Lunar Prospector mission (1998-99). That recent mission generated global maps of elemental abundances on the lunar surface to compare to.

    P.S. As found in the field, for a sense of scale:
    lm_nwa5406siksou2_Hupe

    Reply
  8. cobalt123 Avatar
    cobalt123

    The way to my heart! Thank you so much for sharing the image and the story, wow!

    Reply
  9. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Interesting, while typing my first comment, I was thinking about it’s size: hug it or hold it…. hold it than…. sweet:)
    Another small coincidence….

    Reply
  10. TomiTapio Avatar
    TomiTapio

    It’s kinda cute.

    Reply
  11. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    =) magical powers…

    And there’s more… I was asking about some interesting features inside this one, and Adam Hupé writes:

    "the metal in NWA 5406 is from a completely different meteorite, a meteorite from the asteroid belt within a lunar meteorite. The main source for mixing material on the moon comes in the way of meteorite impacts. There is no atmosphere to slow them down so they strike the lunar surface at cosmic velocity, vaporizing and integrating themselves into lunar breccias. It is very interesting that a type of meteorite can be identified within another meteorite which is the case for NWA 5406. Metal, visible to the naked eye is very rare in lunar type meteorites and Apollo returned samples. This is why the scientists felt it important enough to mention in their abstracts."

    Dr. Tony Irving, the NASA scientist that performed an in depth study as lead classifier on this lunar meteorite, wrote that NWA 4936/5406 “is the first lunar meteorite that could pass for a sample of lunar soil from Apollo 16 and, therefore, likely contains a small component of the same iron meteorite (that is, ASTEROIDAL meteoritic origin) that is found in Apollo 16 rocks and soil.”

    Reply
  12. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE Avatar
    PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

    Haha Awesome, but Agent Mul… Jurvetson, the truth is out there… !
    Behind the beauty and "cooltitude" of this Moon rock, from the dark side…IS the hidden patterns of….

    Your probably made the connection, this is from the millenium simulation the computer N-body simulation which was run in order to investigate how matter in the Universe evolved over time. I saw George Smoot few weeks ago in Paris telling us about the latest in the simulation, about his on-going work and hope for the future of it, Plank and next level simulations. Was fascinating. Anyway, first thing I saw in your beauty was that =)

    Here is another meteorite with cool patterns I came across the same day =)

    PhotonQ-Iron Meteorite

    Reply
  13. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    double jinx then… Did it look familiar?

    What’s That? (89)

    Can’t be made on Earth… In contrast with earth alloys, the microgravity environment and long cooling times in the interior of their parent asteroids allowed the meteoritic phases to grow into large, intermixed three-dimensional crystalline structures.

    Iron-nickel meteorites make up about 6% of those striking Earth (most are stony chondrites) and they come from certain collisions of M-type asteroids that fragment their metal cores.

    This is pallasite — popularized as kryptonite in Superman Returns — and first discovered in Magadan, Russia a couple months after my birth.

    Reply
  14. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE Avatar
    PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

    Ha yes I forgot about that puzzle !!! I knew I had seen it before but couldn’ t pin point the gravity path in my memory. Cool MERCI =) Time fly !!!!

    Reply
  15. mccormacka Avatar
    mccormacka

    Thanks for licensing this cool photo through Creative Commons. I used it in my blog and gave you credit: Gardening with Binoculars: Missing Moon Rocks Redux.

    Reply
  16. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    I discovered that a couple glass hemispheres make for a nice display sphere with a ball-lens magnifying effect, so the details can be seen in focus from a fairly wide angle: DSC00457 DSC00462

    Reply
  17. CASSIDY PHOTOGRAPHY Avatar
    CASSIDY PHOTOGRAPHY

    How did you find it? And, more amazing you were allowed to keep it.

    Reply

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