“The Moon is a dead rock—eighty-one quintillion tons of dead rock. It’s been dead for nearly four billion years. And—inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too.” Anthony O’Neill, The Dark Side.
Over a period of several years I was able to borrow “Lunar Petrographic Thin Section Sets” from NASA, offered as part of their educational outreach program and available on loan from the Lunar Sample Curator. I used the sets in my undergraduate Petrology course, and for evening short courses for school teachers. Among other things, the set includes 12 polished thin sections of lunar igneous rocks, breccias, and soil, and a plastic “sample disk” into which six lunar soil and rock samples are mounted. The photos in these web pages illustrate typical mineralogy and textures in these common lunar rocks and soils.
| Introduction to lunar geology | |||
| Sample disk: lunar rock and soil samples | |||
| Thin sections | Igneous rocks | Mare basalts | Olivine basalt Low-titanium basalt High-titanium basalt Orange soil |
| Highland rocks | Shocked norite Anorthosite |
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| Fragmental rocks | Breccias | Feldspathic breccia Regolith breccia Polymict breccia Impact melt breccia |
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| Regolith | Highland regolith Mare regolith |
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| Reflected light images, all lithologies | |||
| See Meyer (2003) for sample details | |||
