(music throughout) So I do remember the first time I held a Moon sample.
It was in a course at undergraduate level.
I remember being in school and a scientist came
and gave a talk and he actually brought a lunar meteorite.
And at this point he put a what we call a thin section
so we could look down the microscope at them.
A thin section is actually a piece of rock that's been sliced about
the same thickness as a piece of hair and shine light through it.
And you can look at all the different minerals that are in the rock.
So there are actual meteorites
that fall on earth that are made of pieces of the moon.
I remember holding this piece of a lunar meteorite.
It was it was pretty small.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is so small.
We really need more of this.
I remember that was my number one thought was we need more of this.
We need a lot more.
I went home and I think I rang every single person I knew.
I definitely told my family a million times, I don't think they were sick of me,
but like they would definitely go away and tell us something different now.
But no, they weren't. They were they were
over the moon as me.
Pun intended.
For the past
50 years and counting, generations of scientists like Dr.
Natalie Curran have been probing rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts,
using increasingly sophisticated technologies.
We've learned that our moon is so closely related to Earth
that the two must have formed from some of the same material.
Moon Rocks showed the first evidence that the moon has water,
and they've even helped in studying the history of the sun,
which influenced the evolution of life.
I work in the Mid-Atlantic
Noble Gas Research Lab or MNGRL.
You know, we're called Moon Girl Lab because we work with lunar samples.
But it's actually a fun name because we're actually
predominantly female scientists that work in that.
We are looking at basically the history of lunar samples
and being in this lab we're basically rock detectives.
So we're looking at how old the sample is and what the samples made of.
The reason why we want to answer these questions
is because they can tell us a lot about how the this
not only this sample formed, but also how the moon formed
or what the geological processes are that are occurring on the surface of the moon.
So working with the Apollo samples,
I honestly I try to take the emotion out of my lab work.
It's very humbling.
It goes over my head, you know, to have a piece of the moon in my hands.
I study the origins
of organic matter in space.
Organic matter is what makes up all life on earth.
Dr. Jose Aponte and his colleagues are trying to figure out
how the chemical ingredients for life got to earth
and whether they ended up on any other planets or moons.
Although there was never life on the moon, it's an important place to study
as a record of the events such as asteroid collisions
that shaped the solar system.
Rocks on the moon are better preserved
and far older than any rocks we've found on earth.
My job is integrating science into human spaceflight.
So how will we do science on the surface of other planets with astronauts?
We like to say that the moon is a witness plate for the solar system.
And it's it's really true.
When you look at our planet here on Earth, you see things that we all really like,
a lot like vegetation and the oceans and, you know, cities where people live.
All of these things combined with the fact that our planet is actually very active.
Just look at plate tectonics, which creates new crust,
which destroys old crust.
It's again what drives our planet and the evolution of our planet.
These are all things that we're very appreciative of and see every day,
but they're things that actually obscure the geologic record.
When you go to the surface of the moon, however, you have four
plus billion years of history preserved on the surface of the moon
by looking at one rock.
You can learn a lot, you know, just by using your own two eyes
to interrogate a rock and make descriptions about it.
You can learn something about how that rock got there,
how the landscape around you got there, and you can start to really make broad
interpretations about the area around you just by looking at literally one rock.
Then imagine taking that rock back to a lab,
which you can use these really high
resolution lab techniques that we have to peer inside the rock
to get a look at what you can't see with the naked eye to start to understand
how just how old that rock is, how long it's been sitting there on the surface.
So it's really exciting to think that this some small little sample can tell us
a lot about different processes that are not just going on
from the local region where the sample was picked up
but actually from the whole of the moon as well by studying just one rock,
you can learn about potentially billions of years of solar system history.
And so imagine the scientific discoveries that we made with
the couple hundred pounds of rocks we brought back from the Apollo missions
during six missions from 1969 to 1972.
Apollo astronauts have brought back 842 pounds of rocks,
pebbles, sand and dust from the moon.
Today, those samples are carefully stored
in a special facility at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The same facility will store the rocks to be collected by Artemis astronauts.
So I work in what's called the Astro Materials Acquisition and Curation Office.
We just call it the curation office for short.
So all of the Apollo moon, rocks, meteorites, all of our sample return
missions from asteroids, from comets, all of those samples come here to Houston
and it's our office job to take care of those samples
and make sure that they're available to the scientific community to study.
The Apollo astronauts all landed near the moon's equator.
Samples from there have been instrumental to science.
But scientists want to explore other locations on the moon.
Otherwise, it would be like landing in the Arizona desert on Earth
and assuming
that the conditions discovered there reflect those found on the entire planet.
Compared with Apollo, Artemis astronauts will carry out
a very different mission in a drastically different environment.
They will venture to the South Pole, a region
that has water, ice, and could be rich in other resources.
The South Pole is a land of extremes.
Temperatures there can reach -400 degrees Fahrenheit.
I would actually even say curation starts as soon as the mission starts.
So one of the things that I'm talking to, the EVA engineers about a lot
and the astronauts is how to prepare for when they're going to go to the moon.
For example, we know that we're going to collect some rocks.
What are we going to put?
What container are we going to put those rocks in?
Are we going to put them in a can?
Are we going to put them in a bag?
And we need to understand that, because for some of these samples,
they are very sensitive to whether they're exposed to metal or plastic.
And those are designed decisions that have to be made years
before the mission even flies.
They've got to be super strict.
The astronauts on the surface, for me, I'd be like, you know, I'd be like a kid
in a candy store and just want to like I want to take everything.
And, you know, you can only go a certain amount of time.
I'd probably run out of oxygen me when I'd be walking and forget.
It's often said that, you know,
exploration is part of human nature and I definitely agree with that.
I mean, even as a small kid, you know, going out in my backyard and,
you know, picking up dirt and sticking my hands in the creek
and understanding what the little animals and plants were all around me
was something that, you know, I didn't have taught to me by that age.
It's just something that really comes naturally to, I think, most people.
And the same is is true on a much bigger scale.
The desire to explore the solar system and learn more about,
you know, what we can look up at in the night sky and see is really
a fundamental part of human nature.
If we want to visit Mars, if we want to explore the solar system,
or if we think about going to other planets,
we first must learn how to operate
on the moon.
Getting ready to conduct science on the moon and to identify scientifically
interesting surface features takes a lot of practice.
On the next NASA Explorers - Space School, how is NASA
preparing astronauts to think and act like geologists?