[meteorite-list] LOTS OF MOON ROCKS GONE?

[Impactika at aol.com]

Thank you Randy for this "accounting".
 
But it seems to me that other factors are being ignored.
 
First of all some of your experiments and analysis are necessarily 
destructive, and you cannot account for material that has been vaporized, or 
dissolved.
 
Also, some of that material has been cut to make thin-sections, with an 
unavoidable cutting and polishing loss.
 
Yes those losses would be small, but I expect that other the years hundreds 
of experiments and thin-sections have been done, all these add up and 
probably account for at least some of the missing material. 
 
Anne M. Black
_http://www.impactika.com/_ (http://www.impactika.com/) 
_IMPACTIKA at aol.com_ (mailto:IMPACTIKA at aol.com) 
Vice-President, I.M.C.A. Inc.
_http://www.imca.cc/_ (http://www.imca.cc/) 
 
 
 
In a message dated 12/12/2011 1:09:43 PM Mountain Standard Time, 
korotev at wustl.edu writes:
I'd like to address this issue of missing Apollo samples as a researcher.

I just checked my inventory.  I have 999 (really!) line items of 
samples from the 6 Apollo and 3 Russian Luna landing sites from 
NASA.  I can think of only 1 or 2 other researchers who might have 
more.  The total mass is 320.064 g (0.08% of the collection).  That's 
an average of 0.32 g/sample.  But, even that number is 
misleading.  The mass distribution looks like this.

http://meteorites.wustl.edu/Korotev_NASA_Apollo_&_Luna_samples.jpg

Only 49 of the samples exceed 1 gram is mass.  All of the samples >3 
g are not "rocks" but regolith (alias soil or dust) samples.  The 
smallest samples are all thin sections.

My point is that every article about this issue shows a photo of a 
big rock, and NASA just doesn't issue big rocks to us 
researchers.  As someone else mentioned, I suspect the actual mass of 
missing material is not large.

Randy Korotev