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Moons of our Solar System
Moons of our Solar System

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1.2 What happened to this lunar basalt?

Look at sample 10029 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , which was collected by Apollo 11 astronauts. It is a 3.9 billion-year-old lunar basalt containing pyroxene, plagioclase feldspar and metal oxides. Try to locate the rusty spots within the thin section. Can you recognise the different minerals present in the sample? How does this differ from the lunar basalt you saw in Week 5?