When I was a graduate student at the University of Central Florida finishing up my dissertation on meteorite densities and porosities, one day my advisor Dan Britt called me into his office. He said, “I have a little side project for you.” He made me put on laboratory gloves and then handed me a rock. It was small, a few centimeters on each side, grey in color with a few lighter and darker inclusions. It didn’t look like most of the meteorites that I had worked with. “I want you to measure the density and porosity of that,” he told me. And then he told me what I held in my hand. “That is an Apollo moon rock.” He had been allocated five specimens from Apollo missions 12, 14, and 15, as the first part of a new study. Our collaborator in this research, Walter Kiefer from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, wanted to use data of lunar gravity anomalies … Continue reading →