14310 - Impact melt breccia
Collection:
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Fact sheet

14310 - Impact melt breccia

Sample 14310 appears to be a fine grained crystalline igneous basalt but its chemistry reveals it to be derived from a lunar soil that has been welded into a rock by shock melting during a meteorite impact. It may have been a clast within the Fra Mauro formation, which is an impact crater ejecta blanket close to the landing site of Apollo 14. The rock has high nickel and iron contents as well as Fe-Ni-P-S melt globules indicating that it is not of a simple igneous origin although superficially it resembles basalt. It was collected at Station G during the Apollo 14 mission.

The thin section shows that it is fine-grained feldspathic basalt with intersertal texture consisting of lath-like plagioclase and anhedral pyroxene. Many large (2 millimetre) blocky phenocrysts of plagioclase are found in the interlocking network of randomly-oriented laths (~200 micron) of plagioclase. Pyroxene is found interstitial to the plagioclase framework. The cores of pyroxene crystals are orthopyroxene which zone to pigeonite compositions. Augite sometimes forms epitaxial overgrowths on the pigeonite. Ilmenite occurs in the interstices and is intergrown with the outer margins of the pyroxene.

Further details of this and other Apollo samples are here: http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/

About this collection

Sample details

Type
metamorphic
Category
regolith breccia
Rock-forming mineral
pyroxene
Accessory minerals
glass
Category guide  
Category Guide
Title
Refers to any word or phrase that appears in the individual rock names. Names are generally descriptive; they allow users to search for broad terms like ‘granite’ as well as more specific names such as ‘breccia’. However, the adjacent descriptions of the specimens captures a wider range of general words and phrases and is a more powerful search tool.
Description
Refers to any word or phrase that appears anywhere in the descriptions of the specimens
Accessory minerals
Minerals that occur in very low abundance in a rock. They are usually not visible with the naked eye and contribute perhapssver, they often dominate the rare elements such as platinum group metals.
Rock-forming minerals
Minerals that make up the bulk of all rock samples and are also the ones used in rock classi?cation.
Timescale
Selecting one or more period, for example 'Jurassic'.
Theme
A term used to group together related samples that are not already gathered into a single Collection. For instance, there is a ‘SW England granites’ theme that includes such rock types as granite, hydrothermal breccia, skarn and vein samples.
Category
A general term used to label a rock sample. It is a useful way of grouping similar samples throughout a collection. Category names are often, but not exclusively, common rock names (e.g. granite, basalt, dolerite, gabbro, greisen, skarn, gneiss, amphibolite, limestone, sandstone).
Owner
The owner of the sample that appears in the collection. For example, NASA owns all the samples that appear in the Moon Rocks collection
We would like to thank the following for the use of this sample: