“Which is the correct chronology?” David Draper, NASA’s deputy chief scientist, asked. Scientists have tried to extrapolate the ages of younger regions, but different guesses provide a wide range of age estimates. The dating record still contains a huge two-billion-year gap, from one billion years ago to three billion years ago, because all of the Apollo missions touched down on older swaths of the moon. The calibrated crater counts are now used to determine ages of bodies throughout the inner solar system. Rocks from the other five Apollo landings set the ages of those corresponding regions, which then correlated with the different numbers of craters in each place.
With the dating of the rocks taken from Apollo 11’s landing site, scientists then knew the age of that patch of the lunar surface. But while planetary scientists could see which places were older and which were younger, they did not know exactly how old any of them were. Thus, a heavily cratered surface is older than a smooth one. But a layer of ice or lava can erase the craters and reset the clock. Over time, impacts of asteroids, big and small, pocked the surface of the moon and elsewhere. Schmitt said.Īnother far-reaching scientific legacy of the moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts is how scientists used them to calibrate a technique of using craters to determine the ages of places in the solar system. “It told us there were going to be tremendous amounts of potential resources for use in space, and possibly even on Earth,” Dr. A light version of helium, helium-3, is of particular future interest as fuel for fusion reactors, which could generate bountiful, nearly clean energy by combining atoms. Armstrong’s soil also contained hydrogen, helium, nitrogen and carbon, much of which had been deposited by the solar wind, the stream of high-speed particles continually flying outward from the sun.