Marrakesh, 7 Mar. (Maroc-Actu) –
NASA decided to take advantage of one of the last unopened lunar samples from Apollo-era missions to learn more about the Moon and the environment. prepares to return to its surface.
The sample is opened at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston by the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences (ARES) division, which protects, studies and shares NASA’s collection of extraterrestrial samples. This work is being carried out by the ANGSA (Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis) program, a scientific team that aims to learn more about the sample and the lunar surface before the next Artemis missions to the south pole of the Moon.
When the Apollo astronauts brought those samples back 50 years ago, NASA had the foresight to keep some of them unopened and intact.
“The agency knew that science and technology would evolve and allow scientists to study the material in new ways to answer new questions in the future,” the agency’s chief executive said. in a statement Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division at NASA headquarters. “The ANGSA initiative was designed to examine these specially stored and sealed samples. »
Sample ANGSA 73001 is part of a sample of the Apollo 17 propulsion tube collected by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt in December 1972. Astronauts drove a pair of connected 1.5-inch-by-14-inch tubes into the lunar surface to collect rock and soil segments from a landslide in the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the moon. The astronauts then individually vacuum sealed a propulsion tube on the Moon before returning it to Earth. Only two propulsion tubes have been vacuum sealed on the Moon in this way, and this is the first to be opened. The other half of this booster tube, 73002, was returned in a normal (unsealed) container. Since then, the sealed tube has been carefully stored in an outdoor vacuum protection tube and in a controlled atmosphere environment at Johnson.. The unsealed segment was opened in 2019 and revealed an interesting array of grains and smaller objects, called rockets, that lunar geologists were eager to study.
Today, scientists are interested in the sealed lower segment of the nucleus. The temperature at the bottom of the carrot was incredibly cold when it was collected.meaning that volatiles (substances that evaporate at normal temperatures, such as water ice and carbon dioxide) could have been present. They are particularly interested in the volatiles contained in these samples from the equatorial regions of the Moon, as they will allow future scientists who will study the Artemis samples to better understand where and what volatiles could be present in these samples.
The amount of gas that should be present in this sealed Apollo sample is probably very small. If scientists manage to carefully extract these gases, they can be analyzed and identified using modern mass spectrometry technology. This technology, which has evolved to extremely sensitive levels in recent years, can accurately determine the mass of unknown molecules and use this data to identify them precisely. This not only improves measurements, but also means the collected gas can be split into smaller portions and shared with a larger number of researchers doing different types of lunar science.
NASA’s Ryan Zeigler, curator of the Apollo samples, oversees the gas and rock extraction process. It is also Mr. Zeigler’s responsibility to prepare, catalog and share the sample with others for research purposes.
The device used to extract and collect the gas, called a collector, was developed by Dr. Alex Meshik, Dr. Olga Pravdivtseva and Dr. Rita Parai of Washington University in St Louis. Dr Francesca McDonald of the European Space Agency led a team that built the special tool to carefully puncture the container holding the lunar sample without letting any gas escape. Together they created and rigorously tested a unique system for collecting extremely valuable gaseous and solid materials, which are sealed inside the containers.
February 11th, the team began the painstaking process of extracting the sample, which took several months, by first opening the outer protective tube and capturing the gas inside. Zeigler and his team knew what gases should be present inside the outer container and found that everything was as expected. The tube did not appear to contain any lunar gas, indicating that the internal sample tube seal was likely still intact. On February 23, the team began the next step: a weeks-long process to drill into the inner container and slowly collect the lunar gases that are hopefully still inside.
Once the gas extraction process is complete, the ARES team will prepare to carefully remove the dirt and rocks from their container, probably later this spring.