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UT Lab Gets First Look at Lunar Sample

Collected by NASA astronauts 50 years ago, the sample stopped by the Jackson School for X-Ray imaging

ABOVE R-L: 1) Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan preparing to collect core samples (credit: NASA). 2) Jackson School doctoral candidate Scott Eckley holds the lunar sample. 3) Eckley and Johnson Space Center's Apollo sample curator Ryan Zeigler place the sample in a PVC pipe for scanning. BELOW L-R: 1) Eckley and Research Scientist Matthew Colbert look inside the scanner. 2) The X-ray light in the UTCT lab. 3) A slice of the sample, showing abundant geological samples, as viewed by the UTCT scanner.

The Jackson School of Geosciences recently hosted a VIP visitor: a pristine sample of lunar soil collected by astronauts during Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon.

Scientists from the Jackson School’s  The University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT) lab were the first to get a look inside – and they did it all while preserving the sample’s untouched condition. The sample was brought to the lab by NASA’s Johnson Space Center Apollo curator Ryan Zeigler and Jackson School doctoral candidate Scott Eckley, who also manages Johnson’s X-ray CT lab.

They came to the Jackson School’s UTCT lab because of its ability to provide a high-resolution look – up to 12 microns per voxel – of every inch of the sample. This visualization will serve as a research tool and a record of the sample’s original state. The sample itself was opened for the first time by Johnson’s Apollo core processing team earlier this week.

 

When the sample was brought back to Earth it was vacuum sealed inside an aluminum tube placed inside a stainless-steel tube. At Johnson Space Center it was then triple bagged in Teflon in a pure nitrogen environment for the trip to Austin. At the Jackson School it was placed in another, more familiar tube – a PVC pipe from a hardware store – to hold it steady in the lab’s CT scanner.
UTCT researchers Matthew Colbert and David Edey oversaw the scanning and data processing. The final visualization is an exciting look at lunar geology and an Apollo artifact that is open to everyone to explore!


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