So we
received samples from the Apollo 17 mission
which were return to Earth in December of 1972.
So nearly 50 years ago.
Basically we collected on the moon and brought back,
then they were frozen within about a month of being returned.
So no one's ever looked at them since.
It's very exciting.
Curation facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center
sent us the samples and they did have to do some special efforts to keep them cold
because we wanted them to stay frozen.
So they had a special cold shipping box with panels
that were frozen in a very cold freezer and a chunk of dry ice.
We picked it up from the receiving office here at Goddard
opened it up, pulled the samples out and stuck them straight in our freezer
and locked them up safely.
So these
frozen samples were actually collected from a region on the moon
that was in shadow from the sun.
So it was basically a large boulder.
In the near future, we're going back to the moon
and hopefully going to the polar regions of the moon
where some of these regions are in permanent shadow
and they don't see the sun, you know, they're cold.
These particular samples are really great analogs for what we might expect
to see in the polar regions when we go back.
So we actually started last week to process the samples.
So the samples we got are basically dirt, lunar dirt, and we basically made "Moon
tea" out of them.
So "Moon tea"
is what we call it when we pull out the soluble compounds from the soil.
And so we basically take the lunar sample, seal it up with a torch in a little
glass test tube full of water, stick it in an oven overnight and boil it.
And we're just pulling out those soluble compounds that we care about
the same way you'd make tea with boiling water at home.
What we're trying to do is answer some questions
about the history this sample experienced at the surface of the moon.
The surface of the moon is a really hostile environment.
You know, it's not like here on Earth where we have this
beautiful atmosphere that protects us from the nasties of space.
So we have particles from the sun that are continuously hitting the
surface of the moon.
And we've got galactic
cosmic rays that are coming in and penetrating into the surface as well.
They actually create noble gases in these particles.
So you can imagine that there's none to begin with.
And then as they get exposed to this space environment,
they kind of get more and more buildup of noble gases.
And our technique is to actually unlock those noble gases from the sample,
a measure of them, so we can come up with what we call a cosmic ray exposure age.
So it's basically how long this sample has been sat at the surface being exposed.
It's basically getting a "space tan."
Say, 50 years ago,
this same technique, which is called the Noble Gas Mass Spectrometry
would probably need anywhere, you know, tens to hundreds of milligrams
to do the same thing that we now do with a couple of milligrams.
It's really special to be part of this, and particularly
because I can look back at the papers and the processes that the curation office
and the scientists in the 1970s thought about and they put so much care
into preserving these samples for future science
to making sure that they were going to be at their,
you know, the best conditions so that as we develop new techniques,
we're able to go and look at these samples and get new answers
to the science questions that were being asked.
You know, I'm still studying these samples 50 years later
for the from the Apollo mission, the original Apollo missions
and you know, you don't know what's going to be in another 50 years,
but I'm still a part of the Apollo dream of going to the moon
and bringing samples back.
So the fact that we have Artemis now is amazing.
Like having our own Artemis generation is really exciting.
I just can't wait to see people go back to the moon.