RESOLVE · Reconstructing the History of Lunar Volatiles

Reconstructing the History of Lunar Volatiles

The problem: Project RESOLVE (Reconstructing the History of Lunar Volatiles) aims at understanding how the abundance and the distribution of water and its isotopic composition is influenced by the crystal structure of the host mineral apatite in lunar rocks. Apatite, like any other mineral, responds to pressure increase caused by the impact events by accommodating i.e. compressing their crystal structures, causing redistribution of the volatile, but also of the stable (e.g., H, Cl) and radiogenic isotopes (e.g., Pb). Therefore they not only provide a unique opportunity for precise age-determination of an impact event, but also simultaneous determination of the isotopic composition of the water, that is a fingerprint to its source. In that way we can learn when did water enter apatite and what was the source of that water. This takes us further to understand if water on Moon and Earth share the common origin. The importance for society: RESOLVE was presented at the meetings where planning of future space missions took place. These meeting included, but were not restricted to the annual European Lunar Symposium (ELS) and the UK-Node of NASA SSERVI (Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute), where many members of various international space agencies (ESA, NASA and JAXA) definition teams responsible for planning of the future lunar missions were present, too. On the other hand, through the well-established collaboration of the OU and Natural History Museum (NHM, London), RESOLVE was exposed to the on-going planning and development of curation facilities in the scope of the future Sample Return Missions in Europe and internationally (e.g. Hayabusa 2 asteroid sample return, Lunar Polar Sample Return, Bennu asteroid by OsirisREX mission).The strong collaborative nature of RESOLVE advanced the quality of European science, augmenting and facilitating more intensive collaboration with colleagues in North America, Canada and Australia. WPs and Objectives: We applied a multi-disciplinary approach by combining in situ elemental, stable and radiogenic isotope geochemistry with structural characterization of the apatite in order to investigate how geological processes, primarily impacts, affect distribution of water in lunar rocks. This was achieved through four different work packages (WPs) that corresponded to four different objectives (see below).

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз