Dutch Moon Rock Turns Out To Be Fake...

[Peter Lemkin]

[quote=Peter Lemkin]The implications are rather amazing, and I guess every receipient of a moon-rock will now start testing them. Most all were given encased in plexiglass with a plaque and seal of the USA w/flag. It was once insured for 2 million...and is worth 2 cents - if that!......hmmmm.... Hey, Jack, maybe you were right.

I'm agnostic on the veracity of the moon landings. But I would LOVE it if this incident spurred more "moon rock" testing and they proved fraudulent. It's my domino theory--if one whopper is exposed maybe people will open their minds to others.

Back to reality, the mainstream media would probably refuse to report a wide spreak moon rock dubunking.

This is not a subject I've labored on, but my educated guess is that there were some real and some not real missions. I'm a professional mineral collector and mineralogist and it is quite easy [if expensive!] to test if a rock is terrestrial or not [meteor, moon-rock, other]. I'm also aware from mineral shows that very small pieces of rock represented as moon-rock get prices in the many millions. I fear many have been had....but that an Ambassador, who presumably got the sample from NASA, was passing a fake [likely unaware of this fact]......is really amazing! Many museums must be quite alarmed today, and authorizing the appropriate tests! I do believe some samples have proven to be non-terrestrial - although some non-terrestrial rock does come down to Earth naturally - meteorites, for example. Another indication on meteorites are ages older than the Earth. I have one such in my collection. It hardened from molten form about 1 billion years before Earth did.

Peter, I did not know of your geological expertise. In recent years
I read that METEORITES FROM THE MOON had been discovered in
Antarctica. Please tell me how...

1. A meteorite would decide to leave the moon and go to earth, and
2. How is it determined that a given meteorite is "from the moon"?

When I read this, my curiosity was aroused.

Jack

Not just in Antartica, but especially there they have found both meteorites from the Moon and from Mars. Even without going to a planet, one can use spectral analysis of the light from them to know the relative percentages of certain elements. Most are the same range as here on Earth, a few are unique and act like a 'fingerprint' and identify where it is from. They didn't just decide to leave after a fight with the neighbor stones....they were blasted outward during enourmous meteors crashed into Moon/Mars and while most of the rock fell back due to gravity, some was moving fast enough to go into orbit and/or leave the gravitational field of the respective body and later when floating around the solar system fell prey to the gravitational attraction of Earth. Antartic glaciers are especially good at collecting and CONCENTRATING these...one special area - designated 'ALA' has provided hundreds that can be found in most big museums or on the internet.
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By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse

A brown stone the size of a coconut has been identified as only the 14th known meteorite from Mars.

It was picked up in the Dar al Gani region of the Libyan Sahara desert last year by an anonymous meteorite hunter.

A 10-gramme section of the rock was supplied by the finder to Dr Luigi Folco, meteorite curator of the Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide of the University of Siena in Italy.

The meteorite was also investigated by Dr Ian Franchi of the UK's Open University, who, through an analysis of oxygen isotopes, identified a unique "Martian signature" in the rock.

Great stress

Mineralogical and petrographic analyses were also carried out by studying thin slices of the rock with optical and more powerful electron microscopes.

"We're quite delighted," said Dr Folco. "It is definitely from Mars. It is quite a find."

The rock shows signs of having been subjected to great stress and intense shocks, probably from the explosion that tore it away from Mars and sent it on a path to Earth about a million years ago.

The announcement of the new find will appear soon in the Bulletin of The Meteoritical Society. It will be designated Dar al Gani 489.

Poor specimen

Unfortunately, it is not a particularly good specimen. It is fairly weathered, has probably been contaminated by terrestrial bacteria and is not particularly suitable to search for evidence of past life.

Early data indicates that Dar al Gani 489 is very similar to the piece of rock that was classified as the 13th Martian meteorite - Dar al Gani 476. Indeed, the two specimens may have been fragments from the same fall.

Scientists think that there could be more Mars rocks in the Libyan desert.

Of 14 rocks now identified as coming from Mars, six have been picked up in the frozen wastes of Antarctica.
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More than 130 named stones have been described in the scientific literature that appear to be lunar meteorites. Other rocks that have not yet been described in the scientific literature but which might be lunar meteorites are being sold by reputable dealers. The complication is that some to many of these stones are “paired,” that is, two or more of the stones are different fragments of a single meteoroid that made the Moon-Earth trip. When confirmed or strongly suspected cases of pairing are taken into account, the number of actual meteoroids reduces to about 65. Pairing has not yet been established or rejected for the most recently found meteorites, so the actual number is not known with certainty. In the List, known or strongly suspected paired stones are listed on a single line separated by slashes. In most cases, the stones were found close together because a meteoroid broke upon encountering the Earth’s atmosphere, hitting the ground or ice, or while traveling within the ice in Antarctica. (In the other cases, all from northern Africa, we don't know for sure where they were found.) The six LaPaz Icefield stones all have fusion crusts and the broken edges don’t fit together, thus the LAP meteoroid likely broke up in the atmosphere. Among the numerous Dhofar lunar meteorite stones, about 15 appear to all be pieces of a single meteorite.