[light music]
children: "Our World"! [laughter]
- Ever look up at the sky and see the Moon?
Astronauts visiting the Moon might look up and see Earth.
Viewing our planet from a distance
must be an amazing sight,
but it also provides a powerful perspective
on how we fit into a bigger story--
the story of the solar system.
How do we learn about this story?
Well, for this, we look to the rocks.
- We can learn so much from the rocks.
We can learn the age of the rocks,
which will tell us when the moon formed
and when the Earth formed.
We can learn about the ages of the surfaces
of the bodies in our solar system.
Everything that you might be able to figure out
about our solar system we can learn from rocks.
So we are at NASA Johnson Space Center
in the Astromaterials Acquisition
and Curation Office,
but we just call it the Curation Office.
Here we take care of all of the moon rocks
that NASA brought back during the Apollo missions.
We take care of them so that they can be studied
by scientists around the world.
They use instruments
to analyze something specific about the rocks,
and then they use the evidence
they get from those measurements
to tell a story.
So the very first mission, the Apollo 11 mission,
they collected at the very end of the mission,
they collected a whole bunch of dirt,
a whole bunch of the lunar soil,
and they shoveled it into the rock boxes,
and then they brought it back.
And then when they studied that,
they found little, tiny fragments
of white rock inside.
And they were able to reconstruct
the history of how the entire Moon formed
from those one-
or two-millimeter fragments of rock
in that first sample.
That white rock was very rare
and had only formed under very special conditions,
which they didn't think existed on the Moon in 1968
before they went to the Moon.
And so, when they found this rock,
they're like, "Oh, well, there must've been an ocean of magma
covering the entire Moon."
So they couldn't prove it
because the samples were too small,
but when they got back the Apollo 15 samples,
they found a bigger fragment of that same type of rock.
They got a very ancient age,
and from that, our impact origin of the Moon
and magma ocean theory for the Moon--
that all came from those first two samples.
- Wow. It seems there's a lot we can learn from rocks,
and technology has changed a lot
since we first brought them back.
But what new instruments
do we have now that we didn't have
back when the samples were first collected?
- So it used to be, when we were studying the rocks,
we would do everything physically.
And so we would take a rock, and then we would use a hammer
and just smash it and look and see what was inside.
That's not very efficient.
And so now we have an X-ray computed tomography scanner,
just like the medical CT scans,
and what that lets us do
is actually scan the rocks ahead of time
and then use three-dimensional viewing software
to look inside, identify features that are of interest,
and very specifically target those
when we smash it with a hammer.
So that lets us be much more intentional
with how we use the samples.
During the Apollo missions, they collected
about 2,200 individually numbered samples,
and up until about 4 years ago,
we had saved 6 samples in order to be able to study them
with modern techniques--really get the most out of them.
So the Apollo next-generation sample analysis
was looking at unanalyzed samples
using modern technology
and a big consortium of scientists.
- With technology coming so far,
it's amazing how much we're able to learn
from rock samples.
But there's another incredible rock-related tool
that will knock your socks off.
And here to tell us more about it
is Erika Blumenfeld from NASA's Johnson Space Center.
- Have you ever wanted to explore the Moon
or the inner solar system yourself?
We developed Astromaterials 3D so you could do that.
Astromaterials 3D
is an interactive virtual library
of NASA's astromaterials collections,
and you can explore them for yourself
in the Astromaterials 3D Explorer,
which allows you to virtually manipulate
and rotate and look inside of these rocks from space.
- How cool is it that anyone can study moon rocks today?
With powerful tools like Astromaterials 3D
at our fingertips,
it's exciting to explore and learn more
about the stories rocks tell.
But don't just take my word for it.
- The work that we do here in the Curation Office at NASA
is really about preserving the samples for future generations.
And we've had these rocks for 50 years.
We've been learning new stuff about them
every year for the last 50 years.
And so, when we go back to the Moon
and collect a bunch of new samples,
we're gonna learn even more about the Moon
and the rest of the solar system.
- The story is in the rock,
and that, to me, captured my imagination--
that rocks could be scrolls of knowledge,
that they could be storybooks,
that if you know how to read the language in the rock,
you can unravel the stories and the mysteries within them.
And it's meaningful to be able to shine light on these stories
and to share them with the public.
My hope is that we can inspire
the next generation of explorers of all kinds,
whether that's exploring the lunar surface itself
or exploring the samples that come back,
and hopefully our work will open their minds
to an adventure that they'll take into their own lives.
- Advances in technology are continuing the efforts
to help us learn more about the stories rocks tell.
Thanks to Ryan, Erika, and the team
at NASA's Johnson Space Center,
we're able to see and understand the Moon's story
here in our world.
And that rocks.
See you next time.
children: "Our World"! [laughter]