The forthcoming book "Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space" by author, artist, and filmmaker Michael Benson promises a remarkable, magnified look into the world of Apollo 16 Moon rocks and other microscopic subjects.
🔍 The Microscopic Universe of Lunar Samples
The book highlights several Apollo 16 lunar samples, particularly focusing on lunar impact glass.
Lunar Impact Glass Formation: This glass is formed under the intense heat and pressure generated when meteoroids strike the Moon's surface, which is covered in regolith (lunar soil).
The impact melts the disturbed soil, and the molten material instantly cools in flight, forming glass shards, spherules, and beads. Magnified Detail: The images shared from the book, such as those of Apollo 16 sample 60095.05, reveal intricate details like gas bubble craters and stress fractures in the lunar impact glass, captured at a microscopic scale (images are often about one to 1.5 millimeters wide).
Art and Science Fusion: Benson’s work presents these SEM scans as composite mosaic micrographs, showcasing the eerie beauty, symmetry, and complex design of the natural world at sub-millimeter scales.
🔬 The Apollo 16 Mission and Its Haul
The Apollo 16 mission was the only Apollo mission dedicated to exploring the lunar highlands terrain. Although the landing site was initially chosen because some scientists expected to find evidence of volcanic action, the samples collected proved this was not the case.
Breccias Everywhere: Virtually every rock collected was a breccia—a rock composed of fragments of older rocks fused together by the heat and pressure of countless meteorite impacts.
These often reveal complex geological histories. Anorthosite Samples: The collection included large pieces of anorthosite, a plagioclase-rich rock type that is believed to have floated to the surface during the early cooling of the Moon's global magma ocean, forming the Moon's first crust around 4.4 billion years ago.
Sample 60025, for instance, is a 4.36-billion-year-old anorthosite. Scientific Importance: The Apollo 16 samples remain fundamentally important for understanding the evolution of the lunar crust.
The book Nanocosmos takes readers on a journey through these miniature vistas, including the lunar samples from the Apollo program, alongside images of radiolarians, dinoflagellates, diatoms, insects, and microscopic flowers.