Moon of Many Faces 🌜🌗🌛 I am surrounded by a […]

Moon of Many Faces 🌜🌗🌛

I am surrounded by a diverse set of moon rocks, from various locations, depths, and ages. These missionaries came to Earth as meteorites, and they have helped guide the science of the moon’s formation and geology of early Earth, long lost to terrestrial weathering and reformation. The moon offers time capsules from the past 4.4 billion years, as magma oceans solidified on the moon, and then withstood a pummeling of meteor strikes during the late heavy bombardment that left a cratered landscape, untouched by wind or erosion.

Each of these stones were studied by an academic lab with isotope and mineral analysis to establish their lunar origin, and in some cases, likely source regions (e.g., the far side or from the light or dark colored regions of the moon; I’ll include an example map). My large 5.3kg singular stone was just accepted in the Met. Bulletin and another is in submission. I’ll share a bit of lunar history in each caption for my most recent additions to the moon rock collection.

Lunar samples are readily identified by their highly specific geological, mineralogical, chemical and radiation signatures. Lunar minerals were formed in a weak gravitational field, in the absence of water or free oxygen, and have been altered through exposure to cosmic radiation. The minerals comprising the Moon’s crust are limited. Lunar specimens contain gas bubbles originating from the solar wind with isotope ratios that are markedly different than the same gases found on Earth (also a result of cosmic radiation).

When asteroids strike the Moon’s surface, chunks of the Moon are launched into space in much the same way that dust is launched into the air when a child dives onto a bed. One merely needs to view the craters of the Moon to imagine the number of asteroids whose impact would have provided sufficient energy to eclipse the Moon’s gravitational influence and launch surface material into space.

Less than 0.1% of all meteorites recovered are lunar in origin, with less than 150 pounds in total known to exist. Lunar meteorites are so scarce, and so difficult to identify, that not one example has ever been found in Europe or the American continents. Every single lunar meteorite recovery to date has been from a desert where such meteorites are more readily identified (mostly Northwest Africa (NWA) and the cold desert of Antarctica).