I have another story about Australia's involvement in the Apollo program. Over a decade ago a new visiting fellow arrived here in Wollongong: Prof Bruce Chappell who had recently retired from ANU where he had worked in the Research School of Earth Sciences for many, many years. Bruce was a world leader in X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF) and he was helping us optimise our then-new XRF; he was also helping out at Macquarie Uni while still holding an honorary position at ANU (for Bruce retiring didn't mean stopping work).
His main scientific achievements had been in the field of granite formation, which didn't greatly interest me (especially as it was all double dutch to me) but one day he started talking about moon rocks, their composition and how easy it was to recognise them from terrestrial rocks. He also told a delightful story about baby sitting someone's infant daughter while working in the lab (those were different days).
I should have asked more but I stupidly didn't. So I have just done some research. XRF analysis is non-destructive so Bruce (and other labs around the world) were able to determine the major and trace element composition of samples. The samples that Bruce analysed were than passed to other collaborators for further (destructive) analyses. These subsequent analyses were of the isotopic composition of various heavy elements which allowed the Ru-Sr dating of lunar basalts. I'm not sure what technique was used but it was almost certainly Thermal Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (TIMS).
The links below lead to Bruce's obituary and to interviews with some of the other players who were at RSES.
https://www.science.org.au/files/use...-1936-2012.pdf
https://www.science.org.au/learning/...ston-isotope#5
https://www.science.org.au/learning/...hemist#samples
https://www.science.org.au/fellowshi...wood-1930-1993