Possibly not related to the Goodwill rocks, but I thought I'd share some Aussie based NASA history I was involved in back in 2012.
Enter George Hays who retired to North Qld:
Your question about the Moon dust takes me back to a very interesting part of my working career. In 1969, I was a NSW high school teacher working in Barham, a small town on the Murray River. It was there that just one of the teachers owned a TV set, we brought it to the school, and the whole school spent the whole day watching the Moon Landing on that one T.V. set. 43 years ago today! (Thanks for that!)
In 1970 I left teaching to work as an analytical chemist in the John Curtin School of Medical Research, in Canberra. While there I took the opportunity to study geology part-time at ANU for a couple of years. As a chemist, I found it all very easy and got first prizes in all the mineralogy and petrology units (much of it practical, microscopy-based stuff). The ANU geology professor, D. A. Brown, suggested to me that I should go to LaTrobe university, where a friend of his, Prof. A. J. R. White was establishing a new Geology school. I was to be the foundation head technician, and would be responsible for establishing mineral and rock collections, and for creating and describing what became thousands of microscopic thin-sections representing all specimens in the collection. I was given a few weeks working with the lapidary technicians in ANU to gain familiarity with their skills.
One of the academic staff at LaTrobe was a Dr John F. Lindsay, a distinguished sedimentologist who had been seconded to NASA from about 1968 to help train the astronauts in geology. Back in Australia, he was constantly in touch with NASA, and was sent samples of Moon regolith: dust, sand, gravel which he described for publication. That material became part of what I made into rock thin sections. I would produce the slides and do a preliminary identification of the minerals. It was exciting stuff, I personally handled material from Apollo 11 (there was very little of that), to Apollo 16. What amazed me at the time was that I could recognise every mineral I saw! We really can feel a kinship to the Moon.
Security was tight. Doors had special locks and keys involving magnets (very high-tech at that time) which would defy attempts at duplicating keys or picking locks. I worked a night shift, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. to minimise interruption. Every horizontal surface in the lab was covered in alfoil, in case a speck of dust were dropped.
The minerals were typical of basalts and andesites: lots of feldspars – various orthoclase minerals and plagioclase minerals, and familiar ferromagnesian minerals like olivines and pyroxenes. There are minerals like “armalcolite” (from Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins), unique to the Moon, but I never saw those.
There were subtle differences. One was the complete absence of oxidation hence the pure shades of grey seen. Relative to their equivalents on Earth: denser elements prevailed e.g. Ti rather than Fe; lighter or volatile elements are impoverished, e.g. H, S, P, Cl.
The form of the rocks was intriguing. So much like what we see on Earth – the astronauts picked up and threw rocks very like what we pick up and throw here! Here the pieces of rock we walk on, or pick up and throw, were shaped by weathering – on the Moon there is no “weather” – what is going on? One of the forces that breaks rock here is temperature fluctuation – there is plenty of that on the Lunar surface diurnal temperature change is enormous (but a “day” on the moon, from one sunrise to the next, is like a month on Earth).
Another force which shapes our rocks is rain - the Moon does have a phenomenon equivalent to “rain” – the constant bombardment by meteorites from space, and countless more bits of flying debris after impacts on the moon’s surface. It is this constant bombardment that has given the Moon rocks such a familiar look.
The meteor bombardment introduces another phenomenon – pitting. These pits are the micro-equivalent of craters. Even small grains of gravel show impact pits – “craters” of sub-millimetre scale. We don’t see small impact pits in rocks on the Earth, because our atmosphere slows down small flying fragments very effectively. On the Moon, there is nothing to slow down flying fragments.
Yet another phenomenon introduced by the meteor bombardment is glass. Just molten rock – every surface has been splattered with molten glass, usually black to the naked eye, and brown in microscopic thin sections.
On Earth we find “tektites” small (1 – 30 mm) blobs of glass, usually black, but brown in microscopic thin sections. Shapes are spherical, teardrop, flanged discs, even dumbbell- shaped. All obviously have flown through the air, and solidified before landing. Tektites are found on Earth in well-defined “fields” , for example strewn across southern Australia. One hypothesis as to their origin is that they too, are splatters of glass from meteor impacts on the Moon.
Here is a reference to John F. Lindsay’s book printed in 1976.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications...ont_matter.pdf
Developments in Solar System- and Space Science, 3
Editors: Z. KOPAL and A.G.W. CAMERON
LUNAR STRATIGRAPHY AND SEDIMENTOLOGY
JOHN F. LINDSAY
The Lunar Science Institute, Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
ISBN: 0-444-41443-6
Copyright @ 1976 by Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam
What happened to the Apollo goodwill moon rocks?
