Atom Probe Tomography of Lunar Materials

Lunar materials preserve records of the conditions and processes of the time when the Moon was first formed in the giant impact event, but also show evidence of more recent activity that involves the processes of impact cratering and space weathering that are active on the lunar surface today. Alteration due to space weathering can drastically change the reflectance spectra of these bodies as viewed with remote sensing through ground-based telescopes and spacecraft compared to laboratory analysis of the same material that was not space weathered. My work uses atom probe tomography (APT) to investigate the nanoscale characteristics of lunar materials and show how such analyses can be used to better understand the large-scale processes on the Moon. This includes the analysis of space weathered soils brought back by astronauts and the distribution of Pb in the oldest lunar zircon to date.