This is Scientific America's 60-Second Science. I am Christopher Intagliata.
The Apollo missions brought back 842 pounds of rock and soil from the moon, that's nearly 2200 different samples. But the most interesting one, according to a scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa, is a sample named "Apollo 1-0-0-8-5 collected by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11.
"He was about to step back into the lunar module(登月舱) when he turned around and saw there were little spaces in the rock box. He knew that geologists on earth would be just so excited to study these materials, so he just scooped up nine scoops(勺) of soil and put it into the box." Wadhwa explained.
It was one of the most well studied samples of the Apollo missions. And a geologist named John Wood noticed white flecks(微粒) of rock in the soil, which inspired him to dig deeper into the moon's ancient past.
"This was quite a leap of imagination — he proposed that the whole of the moon had been almost covered with a magma(岩浆) ocean nearly 4.5 billion years ago. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, because people had thought the moon had formed cold, so it completely changed our idea how the moon formed."
But Wadhwa has a more personal reason to appreciate this sample. She met her husband Scott Parazynski also because of this rock sample. Scott, a mountaineer at that time, wanted to climb Mount Everest with a moon rock while Wadhwa was the chairman of the NASA committee that gives access to the samples for scientific purposes.
Neil Armstrong's last-minute scoop of moon dust brought two people together here on Earth and upturned our understanding of how the moon — and the Earth itself-got here.
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