• Question: What is the moon made of!

    Asked by anon-246146 to Samantha, Sam, Nicol, Lori-Ann, Liam, David on 9 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by anon-246130.
    • Photo: Samantha Faircloth

      Samantha Faircloth answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Well, it certainly isn’t cheese! The Moon is made of things that are very similar to Earth. In fact, chemically, the Moon is very similar to the Earth. There are similar rocks and minerals (think crystals) on the Moon that are found on Earth. The biggest difference is the lack of lots of water. There are no lakes or oceans on the Moon. All of the water is contained within the rocks in a common mineral called ‘apatite’. This is the mineral that I study. It is special because it can hold very small amounts of water. The other difference is that the Moon doesn’t have as many light elements when compared with the Earth. If you can imagine a volcano erupting, there is lots of gas coming out of the volcano vent and the light elements (e.g. sulfur, carbon dioxide (CO2)) are lost to the atmosphere. The Moon has lost more of these elements, possibly because of the way it formed by a giant, high energy impact with the Earth!

    • Photo: Lori-Ann Foley

      Lori-Ann Foley answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Samantha made my cheese joke!!! Like Samantha says in her answer, the moon and Earth are very similar. We think the moon formed when in the very early days of the solar system a planetoid crashed into the still-forming Earth and and the two of them broke apart and then reformed – one making the Earth and one making the moon. But the parts got mixed up, so parts of the early Earth and parts if the planetoid jumbled, and the Earth and Moon ended up with bits of each other, making them very similar. And Samantha’s answer gives you a lot of really interesting details about its composition.

    • Photo: David Sobral

      David Sobral answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      In principle you could imagine the Earth made of plasticine and then taking a chunk of it and rounding it with your hands. It means the Moon is pretty much made of the same material as the outer parts of the Earth, but it’s too “light” to keep an atmosphere (or to harbour life capable of producing cheese).

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