72535 (6) Impact Melt Breccia
Collection:
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Fact sheet

72535 (6) Impact Melt Breccia

72535 (and its companion 72536) has a texture characteristic of a fine-grained, clast-bearing impact melt rather typical of the Apollo 17 highland breccias. It has a dark porous basaltic-textured groundmass, with plagioclase laths less than 30 microns long sub-ophitically enclosed by irregular mafic crystals. Ca-plagioclase is the major mineral clast. Small lithic clasts make up about ~5 % of the sample. Pink spinel is present as a minor constituent. Rotation 1 shows mineral and lithic clasts and rotation 2 mainly shows a maskelynitised feldspar clast.

The sample weighed 221.4 grams before analysis and has been dated at 3.8874±0.016 billion years (Ar/Ar).

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

About this collection

Sample details

Type
metamorphic
Rock-forming mineral
pyroxene
plagioclase
feldspar
Accessory minerals
spinel
ilmenite
troilite
metallic iron
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: