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SALT LAKE CITY — Fifty years after the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon, a team of expeditionists led by a University of Utah professor found five pieces of lunar rock in Antarctica.
Jim Karner and his team have traveled to Antarctica every year for 11 years as part of a decades-old program funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian. The team’s job is to find rock from outer space that has hurtled to Earth, but never have Karner’s findings been quite so celestial as they were this year.
It was only the first day of exploration for the group of eight meteorite hunters who scanned the frozen tundra of the Transantarctic Mountains about 250 miles from the South Pole. They had explored the area just a few years before, but a flash of color amidst the bland landscape caught their eyes.
“We saw this really amazing black, glassy rock just sitting there amongst, really, tens of thousands of terrestrial rocks,” said Karner, a research assistant professor in the U.'s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “We kind of knew right away — well, we were hoping right away that it was from the moon.”
And sure enough, it was. All five pieces are from the same rock, though each is different in quality.
“I was telling my 5-year-old daughter, this is like a small piece of what you could actually see when you look up at the moon. ... You see light, white parts and dark parts, and that is basically what the rock is made up of,” Karner said.
The “dark part” is a volcanic basalt while the “white part” is a calcium-rich mineral called anorthite, he explained. The two different types of rock make the team’s discovery “particularly noteworthy,” he added.
The discovery will be available for “any scientist in the world” to study, and there have been plenty of studies already conducted on the meteorites found by the United States’ program, Karner said.
“We are the world’s foremost suppliers of extraterrestrial material for scientists to study. … So we feel like we’re doing a good service for science there,” he added.
There are about 200 lunar rocks in the world, and they’re “pretty rare in the grand scheme of things,” according to Karner. With the U. professor's findings, the U.S. Antarctic meteorite collection now boasts nine total lunar rocks made of volcanic basalt.
The rocks will help the scientists who study them interpret the images and data that robots like the Mars Rover or lunar orbiters send back to earth.
“(The robots), they’re taking the measurements and spectra and saying, ‘Well, the rocks look like this.’ … But here’s a real piece of the moon we can say, ‘This is what the actual rock looks like,’” Karner explained. “It lends itself to really detailed analysis and studies. You can’t really do that aboard an orbiter.”
Learning about the moon’s makeup can also help scientists discover more about interstellar processes, the moon’s evolution, as well as the Earth’s.
Karner’s team has previously found Martian rock — an even scarcer commodity — as well as several pieces of asteroids whose origin still remains a mystery. But the discovery of lunar rock is new.
“We were very excited. That kind of makes our trip almost on the first day,” Karner laughed. “Like, OK, NASA’s got its money’s worth.”
