Moon rocks!

Katharine Robinson, a graduate student at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP), has been researching moon rocks. Under the microscope is a thin slice of a moon rock sample, shown on the computer monitor. Image courtesy of Dennis Oda, Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

During the “supermoon” of Sunday 10 August the moon was 221,765 miles from Earth, measured center to center, which is the closest the moon will get to our planet this year. Katie Robinson gets a lot closer than that, in a way: she studies moon rocks as a graduate assistant at the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP). UH has about 120 grams of moon rocks brought here in 1990 for study, and Robinson is investigating the presence of apatite, a mineral that contains water, in the sample. “You get used to working on these tiny little samples …,” she said. “And then you go outside and you look up and you go, ‘Wow, my rocks are from there. My samples are from there. I’m holding moon rocks!’ You kind of remember why you got into it in the first place.”

Read more about it in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required) and see the archived news item “Water in Moon rocks provides clues and questions.”