Fifty years after they were collected, lunar rock samples collected during the final Apollo mission have finally been studies – after development of the technology required to fully understand them.

And not only have they told us more about the natural satellite that graces our sky every night, they are also helping scientists to understand one of the most mysterious structures on our Moon’s surface.

That’s all thanks to the efforts of the crew aboard Apollo 17, who gathered samples from the Light Mantle (a bright streak across the Moon’s surface) as part of their mission.

Only now, in the labs of Natural History Museum, London’s, Dr Giulia Magnarini, have the secrets of the Light Mantle begun to be unpacked.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, Dr Magnarini explained that the team used scans of the rock samples for the analysis to understand more about the clasts – or fragments from the landslide that is thought to have caused the Light Mantle.

And as Dr Magnarini explained in a statement, this information is helping to piece together possibilities surrounding the cause of the landslide, with one particular theory being that it was triggered by the collision that caused the Tycho crater:

“The clasts tell us a lot about the process of the landslide itself and how the material within it has been transported. We saw that the finer material coating the clasts in the core comes from the clast and not the surrounding debris, suggesting that the clasts broke up and helped the landslide to flow more like a fluid.

It’s been suggested that some of the material thrown up by the creation of Tycho might have struck the South Massif. This could have triggered the landslide which ultimately formed the Light Mantle. We’re currently investigating this possibility as part of ongoing research into the Moon’s geological history.”

This information, supported by photographs of the Moon’s surface, are helping Dr Magnarini to draw conclusions on how the Moon’s geology affects events like landslides – which will be helpful to those astronauts who are preparing to travel to the Moon on the Artemis mission, NASA’s first moon mission for decades.

Dr Magnarini’s research on the samples, which were collected more than half a century ago, is really testament to the lasting impact of these missions, and the potentially ground-breaking discoveries that the Artemis missions will make.

Because, as she acknowledges in the statement, the cores, drilled from the Light Mantle, were fascinating at the time, but have been the key to much more advanced research down the line – and hopefully the same will be true for Artemis:

“NASA were really forward-thinking during the Apollo mission to put some samples aside. They were stored so that they could be studied using more advanced technology and new scientific approaches that hadn’t even been thought of at the time. When the samples were originally brought back, scanning technology wasn’t that detailed. Now, with micro-CT scanning, we have medical-level scans that allow us to investigate these samples in fine detail.”

Who knows what technology will have developed fifty years after Artemis, and how the scientists of the future will provide us with more insight into our Moon than ever before.

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