"5 Strange, Cool Things We’ve Recently Learned About the Moon (Live Science).
Reporter Kimberly Hickok includes the low abundance of siderophile elements in her list of “cool things” as #4, but it’s not obvious how tweaking luck is cool. Here’s her list, with our questions and comments in brackets:
Calculations had suggested a craft would sink out of sight into a thick blanket of dust accumulated over billions of years. A JPL News article, “The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Apollo Connection,” confirms the fear at the time:
The Apollo 11 astronauts were able to scrape bedrock with their boots under a thin layer of dust. Buzz Aldrin couldn’t hammer through it. Of this unexpected result, Alan Bean, who walked on the moon on the next mission Apollo 12, writes about his artwork:
atmosphere.
The dust was more than an irritant, though; later work showed that dust can travel at high speeds around the moon, and if ingested by future astronauts, could damage the lungs.
The article says that moon rocks rule out conspiracy theories that the Americans never went to the moon but filmed the Apollo moon landings on a sound stage in Hollywood. Why? Because the rocks the Russians returned from robotic missions matched those from Apollo perfectly. During the cold war, the Russians would never have conspired with the Americans to dupe the public using Hollywood collaborators!
For more answers to this persistent conspiracy theory, see “Moon landings footage would have been impossible to fake – a film expert explains why,” by Harold Barry at The Conversation. See also Phys.org and Space.com for answers to specific claims that Apollo was a hoax."
CEH
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night:
Genesis 1:16
Reporter Kimberly Hickok includes the low abundance of siderophile elements in her list of “cool things” as #4, but it’s not obvious how tweaking luck is cool. Here’s her list, with our questions and comments in brackets:
- There is water on the moon, and it jumps around. Water molecules migrate to cold traps in shadowed craters. [But should it be there after billions of years?]
- There’s an enormous, dense blob of metal below the surface of the moon’s south pole. “The researchers aren’t sure how this giant blob of metal got itself trapped below the lunar surface,” she comments. [Then the storytelling starts.]
- The moon is shrinking and quaking. [Shouldn’t it have quieted down after billions of years?]
- You won’t strike it rich on the moon. This is her take on the lack of gold and other siderophile elements. [Sliding into a trance, Hickok relates the myth of Theia.]
- The moon is two-faced (probably because of a massive asteroid). [Lady Luck to the rescue again.]
Calculations had suggested a craft would sink out of sight into a thick blanket of dust accumulated over billions of years. A JPL News article, “The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Apollo Connection,” confirms the fear at the time:
Five of the seven Surveyors were successful, and the missions answered a key question that would face the Apollo program: “How strong is the lunar surface? There had been some fear that the landers would merely sink into dust, and that would be bad,” Conway said.
The Apollo 11 astronauts were able to scrape bedrock with their boots under a thin layer of dust. Buzz Aldrin couldn’t hammer through it. Of this unexpected result, Alan Bean, who walked on the moon on the next mission Apollo 12, writes about his artwork:
Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is driving a core tube into the moon’s surface. He is finding it more difficult than he anticipated, much harder than driving into the dirt or sand
he used in training here on earth. The whole idea of a core tube is to quickly obtain a continuous sample of surface and subsurface soil. The core tube itself is a hollow metal pipe a foot long with a sharp edge bit on the leading edge. It is then attached to a tool extension handle so that it can be driven into the surface from a standing positing.
Well, the core tube is not going into the moon as expected.
Buzz would comment, “I pushed in 3 or 4 inches and then started tapping it with the hammer. I found that it wasn’t doing much at all of penetrating further.”
Buzz continued, “I didn’t find any resistance at all in retracting the core tube. It came up quite easily. I didn’t find any tendency at all for the material to come out.”
Later, on earth, scientists would say that the soil was fine grained, granular, slightly cohesive, and incompressible. The samples show no fossil life, no living organisms, and no organic materials. More importantly, they would conclude that the moon dust holds no threat to life on earth.” (Alan Bean, Apollo: An Eyewitness Account, p. 68).
If material has been arriving at the moon for 4.5 billion years, then it has to accumulate.
The moon-walking astronauts remember dust being a big nuisance. It clung to everything and was hard to get rid of. The moon rovers kicked up dust, which fell in ballistic paths due to the lack of an 
The dust was more than an irritant, though; later work showed that dust can travel at high speeds around the moon, and if ingested by future astronauts, could damage the lungs.
The article says that moon rocks rule out conspiracy theories that the Americans never went to the moon but filmed the Apollo moon landings on a sound stage in Hollywood. Why? Because the rocks the Russians returned from robotic missions matched those from Apollo perfectly. During the cold war, the Russians would never have conspired with the Americans to dupe the public using Hollywood collaborators!
For more answers to this persistent conspiracy theory, see “Moon landings footage would have been impossible to fake – a film expert explains why,” by Harold Barry at The Conversation. See also Phys.org and Space.com for answers to specific claims that Apollo was a hoax."
CEH
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night:
Genesis 1:16