Apollo 11 50th Anniversary: The Lunar Minerals
The MOOOOOOOOON!!! (image: Wikimedia ) 50 years ago today, Apollo 11 accomplished the bold feat of landing on the Moon and not only did they walk on the Moon, they brought back some of it with them on their return for study. Some bits of lunar rock found their way to becoming thin sections, which you can view here , and occasionally get loaned out to researchers outside of NASA. I was lucky enough to handle and view some of these thin sections in my undergrad Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology class, as well as a thin section of a Martian meteorite (the closest I'll ever get to being on Mars). The lunar rocks have been well-studied by geologists over the years and Mindat.org has curated a list of minerals found on the moon, almost all of which are also found on Earth. The Moon can, in a broad sense, been generalized into two types of igneous rocks: basalt and anorthosite. The bright, white-grey parts of the Moon are the anorthosite dominated areas. These are feldspar-rich ro...