The Apollo 16 lunar regolith breccia 61195. Left: Before cutting it. Right: After cutting it in 4 quarters.
Working with lunar rocks, brought back to Earth by astronauts of the Apollo missions, has been one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. Sure, holding a Martian meteorite in your hand is not banal by any means, especially if this is 4.4. billion years old. But the fact that these lunar rocks have been brought back to Earth by humans who landed on the Moon make them for me even more awe-inspiring. I had the chance to work with several of these rocks, both from the Apollo 16 and the Apollo 17 missions. The objective of my studies: Characterize the evolution of the lunar magnetic field. I conducted both alternating-field demagnetization (i.e., I exposed them to strong laboratory magnetic fields) and thermal demagnetization (i.e., I heated them in a controlled-atmosphere oven up to 780 degrees C -- yes, we bake them…). The results we obtained, when interpreted jointly with the results of previous studies, suggest that the intensity of the lunar magnetic field varied in time, which could potentially help reconciliate the results of numerical simulations and paleomagnetic studies. I have presented out results in two scientific conferences, giving one presentation about the mare basalt samples of Apollo 17 and one about the regolith breccia samples from Apollo 16, and I am now working on the respective papers.
Thanks to these studies, I found out about the Apollo Lunar surface journal. In it you can find live footage from astronauts picking up rocks from the lunar surface. It blew my mind. Here Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt are picking 75075, a mare basalt collected during Apollo 17 at the Camelor crater, and here Charles Moss Duke Jr. is picking up 61195 at the Plum crater (1:42-2:02).
These studies were partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 844252.
Vervelidou, F., Weiss, B. P., Nichols, C., Murray, M., Shah, J., Sheikh, H., Harrison, R., Lagroix, F. (2021). The early phase lunar magnetic field as recorded by Apollo 17 mare basalts, Abstract 981786, AGU Fall meeting, hybrid, New Orleans, LA, USA.