New Views of Lunar Geoscience: An Introduction and Overview

Beyond the Earth, the Moon is the only planetary body for which we have samples from known locations. The analysis of these samples gives us “ground-truth” for numerous remote sensing studies of the physical and chemical properties of the Moon and they are invaluable for our fundamental understanding of lunar origin and evolution. Prior to the return of the Apollo 11 samples, the Moon was thought by many to be a primitive undifferentiated body (e.g., Urey 1966), a concept shattered by the data returned from the Apollo and Luna missions. Ever since, new data have helped to address some of our questions, but of course, they also produced new questions. In this chapter we provide a summary of knowledge about lunar geologic processes and we describe major scientifi c advancements of the last decade that are mainly related to the most recent lunar missions such as Galileo, Clementine, and Lunar Prospector.