Opening One of the Last Sealed Apollo 17 Moon Samples

NASA Scientists Open Apollo 17 Moon Samples. NASA, Johnson Space Center.

Unopened since Apollo

Over the past few years, a team of lunar sample processors and curators in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has opened a few Apollo 17 samples that had never been opened. They are studied under the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA), and cores like these hold a lasting geological record of the Moon, Earth's closest neighbor.

This one is Apollo 17 soil sample 73002, studied with advanced technology, including non-destructive 3D imaging. The processing team: Charis Krysher, Andrea Mosie, Juliane Gross and Ryan Zeigler.

Retired NASA astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmitt helped Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan collect the original samples on the Moon, and lent his expertise to the modern analysis.

How a core is opened

• The drive tube goes first into a catapult-like device the team calls the "rocket launcher."
• Its end caps come off, and threaded metal rods, with plates on their ends, go into each end.
• The tube moves to a second device with a wheel. Turned very slowly, the wheel engages the threads, and the rod pushes the sample out.

A core from the Moon

The film recalls that Cernan collected this core near the edge of a crater. The double drive tube, driven into the surface, was among the most important tools the astronauts had — still very hard to use, but it brought back many good cores. They tell of the debris layer on the Moon's surface, and hold a history of the Sun.

Why wait?

Early in Apollo, NASA expected that analytical technology would mature, so the same old samples could yield new information. For lunar scientists, the film says, "Apollo never ended."

• Water: techniques can now detect the water in some ancient lunar rocks.
• A shared past: the samples point to a common history and source with Earth, as earlier studies of Apollo samples had found.
• 3D structure: X-ray computer tomography (XCT) lets scientists see a sample's three-dimensional structure, which they couldn't before.

Looking ahead

Under Artemis, NASA is preparing to return to the Moon — this time to its South Pole — to gather more samples for present and future generations. A whole industry of engineers is studying how to extract resources from the Moon, and during Artemis the scientists want to test how well new technologies extract water and other materials. Only robotic missions have ever gone to Mars; when people go, these are questions they'll face too.

More: the film's page on NASA Image and Video Library and on the Internet Archive.

Sources

Based on "NASA Scientists Open Apollo 17 Moon Samples," a film and its description by NASA's Johnson Space Center, NASA Image and Video Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain.