Press Room

Media Contacts:

David Perry, (415) 693-0583
news@davidperry.com
Judyth Collin, (510) 336-7310
jcollin@chabotspace.org

This document and all Chabot Space & Science Center news releases may be found online at www.chabotspace.org under Press room.

1 November 2002 -- OAKLAND, CA: What's older than last year's fruitcake and smaller than a breadbox? A NASA Moon rock! This ancient rock, over 3.3 billion years old, is the centerpiece of the Moon Mystery exhibit, opening November 29 at Chabot Space & Science Center. The exhibit explores questions about the Moon's origin and offers a glimpse through time of the Moon's influence of life on Earth. Accompanying the exhibit is a series of Weekend Spotlight hands-on family workshops about the Moon. In celebration of the exhibit, Chabot will also be hosting an "Antique Rock Roadshow" event on Wednesday, December 4, from 4 – 7 pm.

The Moon rock, on permanent loan from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, is a golf ball-sized piece of the largest and most intensively studied Moon rock collected by astronauts David Scott, James Irwin and Alfred Worden in their 1971 Apollo 15 mission. It is cut from a larger piece of "mare basalt" known as "Great Scott," or specimen 15555-879, a 9.6-kilogram specimen found near the Apollo 15 landing site.

The Apollo 15 lunar landing site was in the Hadley-Apennine region near the Apennine Mountains, at the edge of Mare Imbrium, the "Sea of Rains." Apollo 15 was the fourth mission to land men on the Moon, and the first flight of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). From 1969 through 1972, six Apollo missions retrieved from the Moon's surface 842 pounds of rocks, and these offer clues into the formation of our solar system. While Earth's geological activity and erosive atmosphere have practically erased any geologic record of the early times of our Earth-Moon system, the Moon, geologically dead and without an atmosphere, has remained largely unchanged for more than 3 billion years.

Today's most widely accepted theory of the Moon's origin is known as the "Giant Impact" (dubbed the "Big Whack"), which asserts that the Earth and Moon co-evolved after a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth early in its formation (about 4.5 billion years ago), sending masses of material from the Earth and the impacting planet into space. Some of the material fell back to Earth, some flew away into the solar system, and the rest formed into the Moon — on a time scale possibly as short as 1 to 100 years! The core of the impacting body sank into the Earth and became part of its core. The latest refinements to the "Giant Impact" theory account for the Moon's iron deficiency and low density, as most of the material that formed the Moon came from the lower-density, iron-poor mantles of Earth and the impacting planet.

Chabot's Moon rock also offers a glimpse of the Moon's influence of life on Earth. Recent theories hint that we may owe our very existence to the Moon's gravitational influence, which causes strong tides in Earth's oceans. Long ago, complex molecules floating in Earth's ancient oceans could concentrate in tide pools, which were constantly flooded and emptied by the tides, which flushed these molecules into the wider ocean, dispersing increasingly complex life forms throughout the planet.

Chabot Space & Science Center is located at 10000 Skyline Blvd. in Oakland's Joaquin Miller Park. Open Tuesday–Sunday. General admission to the Center galleries is $8.00/$5.50 seniors and children (with an additional charge for shows in the Planetarium and MegaDome Theater). Children under 3 are admitted free; Students with ID receive a $1.00 discount. General admission to the galleries is FREE on the first Wednesday of each month (with an additional charge for Planetarium and Theater). Tickets may be purchased at the door, or by calling (510) 336-7373. Advance tickets are available on-line at www.ticketweb.com or by phone at (866) 468-3399.

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