50 years after NASA’s Apollo mission, moon rocks still have secrets to reveal

NASA scientists are using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study moon rocks collected from the Apollo space missions. The samples are made of dust and rock fragments that combined and struck the moon’s surface possibly billions of years ago. As plans to travel to Mars progress, insights into the rocks could reveal more about the formation of the solar system and where water might be found on the moon.

A bigger nursery for the solar system’s first formed solids

The earliest solids formed in the solar system give clues to what radioactive species were made by the young sun, and which ones were inherited. By studying isotopic variations of the elements vanadium (V) and strontium (Sr), an international team of researchers including scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that those variations are not caused by irradiation from the sun but are produced by condensation and evaporation reactions in the early solar system.

Polymers in Meteorites Provide Clues to Early Solar System

Meteorites that do not experience high temperatures at any point in their existence provide a good record of complex chemistry present when or before our solar system was formed. So researchers have examined individual amino acids in these meteorites, many of which are not in present-day organisms. In Physics of Fluids, researchers show the existence of a systematic group of amino acid polymers across several members of the oldest meteorite class, the CV3 type.

Science Snapshots From Berkeley Lab

Science Snapshots From Berkeley Lab – Water purification, infant-warming device, cuff-based heart disease monitor, ancient magnetic fields