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Author: Mahesh Anand, Andy Tindle

Discover Moon minerals

Updated Tuesday, 10 January 2023
View the Moon Minerals book published by Professor Mahesh Anand and Dr Andy Tindle.

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Moon Minerals is a comprehensive and easy to follow visual guide of minerals that have been reported in lunar samples. For those who may like to delve a bit deeper to develop an understanding of the scientific context for many of these minerals, you will find the associated text particularly helpful. Indeed, one of the aims of making this book freely available to the worldwide community is to support the research of current and future generations of planetary mineralogists. The work by Professor Mahesh Anand and Dr Andy Tindle heavily draws upon the rich literature of published work to contextualise Virtual Microscope images of Moon Minerals.

The book has two substantive chapters - Chapter two “Major Minerals” and Chapter three “Accessory Minerals”. They both have the same format, although Chapter three has significantly fewer interactive Virtual Microscopes. This is because most accessory minerals form very small crystals and these cannot be clearly resolved with a conventional microscope. Instead, images collected with a scanning electron microscope or other imaging instrument are presented.

Virtual Microscopes are interactive and allow the user to examine samples as if they were sat in front of a geological microscope. A collection of over 500 Virtual Microscopes of lunar samples, plus many other extraterrestrial samples are on the website www.virtualmicroscope.org. For those who may have little experience of geological microscopy, there is also an interactive book on the Apple Bookstore titled "Minerals Under the Microscope".

 

Moon minerals book cover

 

Click on the image above to view the Moon Minerals book (PDF document14.0 MB) .

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