Planetary Geoscience

Return to the Moon

“Return to the Moon” is an exciting new opportunity for those scientists who lived during the Apollo Missions from 1969-1972, humans first landed and brought back rocks from another planet.  UT has one of those people, Dr. Lawrence A. Taylor, who was involved in Apollo Mission and has been studying these unique rocks and soils ever since.  Since Apollo at UT, lunar research continues to be exciting and productive, involving dozens of  postdoctoral research associates and graduate students.

Main Lunar Research area:

• The formation and evolution of our Moon, its interaction with the space environment, the in-situ resources utilizations (ISRU) on the Moon, and engineering/ medical research associated with ISRU and human settlement on the Moon, are active research topics by our lunar research group in the Planetary Geosciences Institute.  The key theme in our studies of the Moon is the geochemistry and petrology of lunar rocks and soils to further understand such major topics as the lunar magma ocean (LMO), the widely applied model for the evolution of terrestrial planets, as well as the processes of space weathering to form the soils.   LMO is used as a standard paradigm for early evolution of other terrestrial planet bodies.
  
  
• Another major focus of our research is the marriage between ground-truth study and remote-sensing techniques.  Mineralogy and chemistry of lunar rocks and soils provide key calibrations for interpreting remote-sensing data.  This research is conducted with active collaboration with Carle Peters at Brown University through The Lunar Rock and Mineral Characterization Consortium (LRMCC), as part of a new Lunar Science Institute, and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) team, which had an instrument on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 orbiter of the Moon.
  
  
• There has been a renewed, enthusiastic interest in our nearest planetary neighbor with constantly new discoveries from recent five (5) lunar orbiter missions (Japan, India, China, ESA, and USA). The discovery of water on this previously-dry airless rocky body, involving members of our team, has opened doors to many new avenues of research.  Using Moon as a launching station for human exploration to Mars and beyond is a very real possibility.  Returns to the Moon for exploration, science, and eventual human settlement necessitate the resolution of many problems associated with ISRU of lunar materials.  Science, medical, and engineering research in this direction encompasses the third main focus of our lunar research group.