68501 - Highland Regolith Soil
Collection:
Apollo 16
Click the microscope button to view a thin section for this sample.
Microscope
Click the microscope button to view a thin section for this sample.
Microscope

Fact sheet

68501 - Highland Regolith Soil

Sample 68501 is mature lunar soil known as a regolith, which was collected at Station Eight during the Apollo 16 mission. Regolith is produced from the fine-grained debris formed in both large and small impacts. Agglutinates (clusters of dust welded together to form larger particles) in the soil form by melting due to continual bombardment of the Moon’s surface by micrometeoroids.

This sample was sieved to remove the very fine dust, allowing examination of the range of large fragments. It mainly consists of fragments of highlands rocks, anorthosite, norite and microbreccias, impact-produced glass and agglutinates. The soil shows that the Lunar Highlands are very rich in plagioclase feldspar but contains relatively few fragments of mare basalts. 

Further details of this and other Apollo samples are here: http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/

Additional images
 
  • The Apollo 16 lunar buggy close to sample location 68501
  • Lunar surface close to 68501 sample location
  • Sampling the lunar surface close to location for 68501
About this collection
 
Apollo 16

The Apollo 16 landing site was in the hilly region around Descartes crater in the lunar highlands. The landing spot was chosen to allow the astronauts to gather geologically older lunar material (Descartes Formation and the Cayley Formation) than the samples obtained in the first four landings, which were in or near lunar maria.

The mission lasted 11.1 days, with a stay on the lunar surface of 71 hours. The crew were on the lunar surface for 20.2 hours during which they traversed approximately 27 kilometers and collected approximately 96 kilograms of samples.

Apollo 16 was launched on 16 April 1972.

Sample details

Collection: Apollo 16
Type
sedimentary
Category
regolith
Rock-forming mineral
pyroxene
plagioclase
feldspar
glass
Category guide  
Category Guide
Title
Refers to any word or phrase that appears in the individual rock names. Names are generally descriptive; they allow users to search for broad terms like ‘granite’ as well as more specific names such as ‘breccia’. However, the adjacent descriptions of the specimens captures a wider range of general words and phrases and is a more powerful search tool.
Description
Refers to any word or phrase that appears anywhere in the descriptions of the specimens
Accessory minerals
Minerals that occur in very low abundance in a rock. They are usually not visible with the naked eye and contribute perhapssver, they often dominate the rare elements such as platinum group metals.
Rock-forming minerals
Minerals that make up the bulk of all rock samples and are also the ones used in rock classi?cation.
Timescale
Selecting one or more period, for example 'Jurassic'.
Theme
A term used to group together related samples that are not already gathered into a single Collection. For instance, there is a ‘SW England granites’ theme that includes such rock types as granite, hydrothermal breccia, skarn and vein samples.
Category
A general term used to label a rock sample. It is a useful way of grouping similar samples throughout a collection. Category names are often, but not exclusively, common rock names (e.g. granite, basalt, dolerite, gabbro, greisen, skarn, gneiss, amphibolite, limestone, sandstone).
Owner
The owner of the sample that appears in the collection. For example, NASA owns all the samples that appear in the Moon Rocks collection
We would like to thank the following for the use of this sample:

More from this collection

Apollo 16