Tomoko Arai, Recon team, 23th December, 2012, South Graves Glacier

We are still in stuck in the storm. Yesterday Katie described about the importance of lunar meteorites, which are one of my main research interest as well. I would like to continue to talk about lunar meteorites a bit more. When future lunar science missions (landing or sample return) are proposed and discussed, comments always arise if we need more lunar samples in addition to the existing Apollo and Luna samples. The answer is definitely YES and the reason for this is provided by lunar meteorites. As Katie mentioned, lunar meteorites likely represent random sampling of the lunar surface, and, are thus significant source of information on the global surface of the Moon. Studies of lunar meteorites have uncovered unknown portions of the Moon, duration of volcanic activities, chemical composition of mare basalt magmatism, history of impact events, and mineralogy and chemical composition of the highlands feldspathic crust. While lunar meteorite studies have been evidently expanding and revising our previous understanding of the Moon, they are still far from reaching a definitive conclusion on lunar origin and history, due to the insufficient statistics. We need to continue on the research on newly recovered lunar meteorites as well as the not-yet analysed Apollo/Luna samples. Recent remote sensing missions have also advanced lunar science to great extent. The spatial resolution of the camera images and reflectance spectral data has reached to a few tens of meters to centimeters, which are almost comparable to that of the sample analyses in the laboratory. Calibration and interpretation of such remote sensing data on the global lunar surface does require ground truth samples on globe-wide scale, which can be provided by lunar meteorites, though their specific provenance (source on the lunar surface) is hard to be defined. Synergy of sample analyses and remote sensing has become more essential than ever in lunar science. Two lunatics (Katie and I) are thinking and discussing about science and the future of the possible eighth continent (the Moon), while stuck in the awful windy and snowy storm on the seventh continent (the Antarctica). Can you tell who is who in the pictures ?

guess who #1

guess who #2