Moon Rocks and the Age of the Moon
Prof.
Oliver Schaeffer, founding Chair of what was then the Department of
Earth and Space Sciences, and Postdoctoral Fellow John Funkhouser were
part of the team that announces the first dating of the age of the
Moon - at about 4 billion years - based on the rock samples brought
back by the Apollo 11 astronauts, the first humans to walk on the Moon,
in July, 1969. These findings, the first scientific report based on
analysis of lunar material actually retrieved from the Moon, were reported
in the September 19, 1969, issue of Science under the authorship of "The
Lunar Sample Preliminary Examination Team," of which Prof. Schaeffer
was a member. They were presented in a much more extensive form at
a Lunar Science Conference of all mission investigators in Houston
and published in an extraordinary 380-page "Moon Issue" of
Science on January 30, 1970.
Stony Brook's team, led by Oliver Schaeffer, determined the concentration
and isotopic signature of argon gas contained in lunar samples. They
combined these data with potassium concentrations for the same samples
to derive an age of about 4 billion years for the Moon. This initial
determination by the Stony Brook-led team has been corroborated by
several other research teams using complementary techniques. Obtaining
the age of the moon, our nearest neighbor, is a scientific milestone
that has deepened our understanding of the early history of Earth and
helped set boundaries for dating the origin of life on Earth.