Science: Portfolio from Apollo

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The photographic outpouring also pleased scientists at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, who found the pictures highly useful in initial identification and examination of the freshly arrived lunar rocks last week. Geochemist Paul Cast, the Manned Spacecraft Center's chief lunar scientist, noted, for example, that the closeups of the moon's surface were so clear that the orange soil showed up as a distinct band in the surrounding material. To Cast, those sharp color boundaries were another indication that the orange soil is young by lunar standards and a product of relatively recent volcanism on the moon. If the band of orange soil had been around a long time, he points out, its distinctness would have been blurred by the slow "gardening" of the moon's surface that occurs under the relentless bombardment of particles from deep space.