World Study Of Moon Samples

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32035, 9 July 1969, Page 17

World Study Of Moon Samples

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) LONDON, July 8. When a part of the moon comes down to earth, 15 privileged teams of scientists in Britain will be waiting to scrape, slice, heat, probe, crush, dissolve, bombard, irradiate and measure it, writes “The Times” news team assigned to the Apollo 11 project. By grain, lump and spoonful it will go under microscope, X-ray and spectrometer, and into radioactive chambers and magnetic vacuum.

One geochemist said yesterday that it would become the most-studied material yet examined.

“Nothing has ever had this battery of techniques unloaded on to it in such a short space of time," he observed. Britain expects to receive the greatest quantity outside America of the precious rock and soil the Apollo 11 astronauts bring back from the moon.

It is going to scientists of international repute, accepted by the United States National

Aeronautics and Space Administration as “investigators of lunar material.” The astronauts have been asked now to bring back about 1001 b of the surface—twice as much as originally planned—from which pieces are to be distributed to about 150 laboratories throughout the world. Germany, Canada and Japan are also among the chosen countries. Many of the scientists will have to be content with no more than a saltspoonful. Only 20 or 30 per cent of the samples the astronauts pick up are expected to be available; and when the investigators have finished with the lunar material, the Americans want it back, whatever its condition.

Many experiments on the samples are planned. Professor Samuel Tolansky, of the Royal Holloway College, hopes he may receive diamonds. He believes that these may lie round the rims of craters on the moon, created by shock-waves from meteorites crashing on to the surface and turning carbon into diamonds.

The professor thinks that the moon may also be littered with tektites, like glass marbles, created by splashes of glass caused by meteoric collision with rock.

On earth, they are usually button-shaped because of the atmosphere. If lunar tektites are spherical. Professor Tolansky says, it would be unlikely that the moon had an atmosphere when they were formed. If the professor receives any diamonds he says he would not expect them to be gems. “They would probably be like dirty black powder,” he says. Professor Stanley Runcorn, head of the school of physics at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, is acting as coordinator for the moon-sample teams in Britain. He is chairman of the Science Research Council’s working group on the moon, planets and interplanetary matter, and is now in the United States. Dr David Collinson, senior research officer at the university, who will work as part of the Newcastle team, said yesterday that it would be measuring the magnetic properties of the samples they received.

“We hope to get some solid pieces of rock,” he said. “We shall he looking for signs of permanent magnetisation, like rocks on earth.” Magnetisation on earth is known to arise from its molten core. Dr Collinson said that the Newcastle tests might

determine whether the moon had originally been a molten body, or might help to resolve the presently-favoured theory that all the planets were formed by an accretion of small particles. Dr Geoffrey Eglinton, who will head a team from the organic geochemistry unit at Bristol University, said that its experiments could show whether life had existed on the moon; he added that he had a completely open mind on the issue. In a report published in the latest issue of “Chemistry in Britain,” the journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and the Chemical Society, Dr Eglinton and his colleagues say that one of their main problems will be contamination of the samples. Dust, organic vapours and finger-prints could affect them and—since they would come from the immediate vicinity of the . spacecraft—exhaust fumes from the rocket engines. How the samples will be brought to Britain has not yet been decided. They must first be examined in the isolated confines of the lunar receiving laboratory at Houston, Texas. British scientists will probably have to cross the Atlantic to collect them.