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The moon's magnetic field may have been altered by huge sinking rocks

13 January 2022

There’s a new explanation for the moon’s former magnetic field, and it involves 60-kilometre-wide slabs of rock sinking through the lunar mantle

$NASA image of Troctolite 76535. NASA/Johnson Space Center photograph S73-19456. - [1] Troctolite sample 76535 brought back from the Moon by Apollo 17. This sample has a mass of 156 grams and is up to 5 centimeters across. It was collected as part of a rake sample at station 6 at the foot of the North Massif. Another view of this sample was used in Figure 7-16 of the Apollo 17 Preliminary Science Report (SP-330, 1973), which has the following caption: Coarse-grained norite (sample 76535) with fresh-appearing plagioclase (white to light gray) that has typical striations of albite twinning. Although pyroxenes (medium gray) are fractured along cleavage planes, they do not appear badly crushed.$

Apollo 17 rock sample hints the moon cooled faster than we thought

14 December 2021

A rock sample collected from the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 has been re-examined, and the results suggest the lunar surface might have cooled in just 20 million years

The moon may never actually have had a strong magnetic field

4 August 2021

We used to think that the moon had a strong magnetic field like Earth's, but a new analysis of rocks collected by the Apollo missions suggests that previous signs of magnetism came from asteroid impacts instead

The tides are getting stronger thanks to the shifting continents

15 May 2018

The ocean tides are the strongest they have been for millions of years, and they will get stronger for several million years to come – because of the position of the continents