The first week of December I took a trip to Houston with my second daughter to visit my son and his family. We had several events planned during the trip all of which I would highly recommend to any visitor to Houston. We attended a truly wonderful performance of Dickens “A Christmas Carol” at the Alley Theater in Downtown Houston. That will of course not be running as this article is read. But the resident cast of the theater is fantastic and I would anticipate that any play would be great. The King Tut exhibit at the Houston Museum of History might be still there for a while. On a side note of that. I explored around the same floor of the museum and ran across an additional huge room of ancient Egypt that was really spectacular. Wonderful artifacts everywhere and some of the best mummies that I have seen anywhere in my many travels. On the last full day my daughter and I drove over to Texas City to a small museum which had several themes with associated exhibits. All were delightful topics, but I was there for the large in-depth exhibit area devoted to the Texas City Disaster. The SS Grandcamp freighter loaded with 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded at close to 9:12 AM on April 16, 1947.
The explosion was heard 150 miles away. The blast created a 15 foot tidal wave. Much of the city was destroyed. Subsequently a second ship loaded with sulfur named the SS High Flyer exploded. The fires burned for several days. It is still listed among the largest manmade non-nuclear explosions. It is great museum if you find yourself in the Houston area with some time to spare. None of this has anything to do with meteorites but our activities on the first day of the trip did.
My son lives only about three miles from Johnson Space Center, and we were scheduled to have a great day there and see a few meteorites. Several years ago my wife and I went to Kennedy Space Center and spent a few days including the anniversary of the exact day we meet for real Which was the day the astronauts landed on The Moon for the first time. It is bigger as a tourist attraction than Johnson Space Center but there were many cool things at Houston. Our day began early at “Breakfast with an Astronaut.” We attended “Lunch with an Astronaut in Florida but there had been 250 or so persons and it therefore lacked any real contact with the astronaut. At Houston there were just 12 of us at breakfast. We got to chat with Bill McArthur at some length as he came to our table. We heard at detailed story about his career with NASA. During the long Q & A period I asked him about the precautions that have been taken to protect spacecraft and the ISS from micrometeorites and larger objects. He gave a long and interesting answer, and I learned about the methods used to move the ISS when they have too.
After breakfast we had the main display area to ourselves for a while until the facility was opened to the public. The first meteorite to catch my eyes was a large Brenham that I recognized. In fact it is the largest piece of Brenham and the largest pallasite in the world. I had seen it many times before. It had attended the Tucson Gem and Mineral show. I was happy to see it at JSC and delighted that it was so well displayed and had been cleaned up a bit more. Though it was always beautiful as an oriented pallasite.
We headed through all the exhibits, and I took pictures of the Apollo lunar rocks that were on display in a simulated or perhaps real clean room exhibit. As it turned out NASA picked quite special Lunar rocks to show visitors.
15555
Lunar Sample 15555 nick named “Great Scott” was collected during the Apollo 15 mission about 12 meters north of the rim of Hadley Rille. 15555 is a medium-grained olivine basalt, with a few percent small vugs. It was one of the largest rocks collected during the whole course of the Apollo Program. The rock was a 9.614 kg (21.20 lb) stone which has been cut up and distributed to several locations including the piece on public display at JSC. The rock was collected on the Moon by Dave Scott for whom it is also named.
15498
Lunar Sample 15498 was collected near the south rim of Dune Crater. It is a regolith breccia, composed of a glassy matrix breccia with components mainly of mare derivation, including basalt fragments and glass. Its original weight was 2340.00 g. Lunar Sample 15498 as collected during the Apollo 15 mission.
60015
Lunar Sample 60015 was collected about 30 meters west-northwest of the Lunar module on the Apollo 16 mission. It is an anorthite rock which was one of the types of rock especially desired to be found as it might offer insight into the formation of the Moon. It is a very light gray, shock-melted and cataclastic anorthosite. 60015 is largely coated with vesicular glass up to 1 cm thick. The stone weighed 5574 grams originally.
76015
Lunar Sample 76015 was collected during the Apollo 17 mission. It is an impact melt breccia. We are sort of used to seeing impact melt breccias. They have made up many of the Lunar meteorites found on Earth that we have bought in the last couple of decades. Lunar Sample 76015 was collected at the North Massif.
It is a Vesicular Micropoikilitic Impact Melt Breccia. It was chipped off top corner of Block 5 of the big boulder at Station 6. The boulder is from the melt sheet or ejecta blanket from the Serenitatus impact event. The original collection weight of the stone was 2.8 kilograms.
There is a wealth of information available online about these and many other Lunar Samples. Research papers on specimens contain all the details about chemistry, petrology, and collection location necessary to keep anyone occupied for years.
It was fascinating to see these rocks. The repository for the rest of the Apollo collected rock is in Houston and a trip through that facility would have been great maybe at a later date that can be arranged. I have been given access to see into the vault of other museum backrooms and it is always thrilling. Seeing these four Apollo mission collected stones made me want to go home and spend some time appreciating the lunar meteorites in my own collection. Have a happy, safe and prosperous 2025.
