Moon Dust

As Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt poked around a lunar crater last December, he suddenly shouted, "Hey, there is orange soil! It's all over!" Schmitt's excitement was shared by scientists back on earth. Because the soil looked remarkably fresh and the crater resembled volcanic vents on earth, they speculated that volcanic activity might well have occurred on the moon as recently as 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. That would have upset the widely held view that the moon has been largely dormant for more than 3 billion years. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett: "If the material is indeed so young, we may have witnessed one of the important finds in Apollo geology."

Last week the highly publicized orange soil produced some unexpected disappointment. Using "atomic clock" dating techniques. Dr. Oliver Schaeffer and his lunar-analysis team at the State University of New York at Stony Brook determined that the material was 3.71 billion years old, within the age range of other moon samples that have been brought back to earth. How could scientists have been so far off the mark in their first estimates? Conceding that it was all a "big surprise," Schaeffer theorized that the long-buried soil might have been dug up recently by a meteoroid impact, thus giving it a fresh look.

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