Apollo 14 Olivine Vitrophyres: Geochemical Evidence for Heterogeneous

Introduction: Olivine vitrophyres are impact melts, consisting of Lunar highlands and KREEP-rich materials, that are primarily composed of olivines in an opaque glass, sometimes with lath-like plagioclase crystals [e.g. 0-2]. Petrographically, these are similar to vitrophyric Apollo 14 high-Al basalts [11]. The purpose of this study was to use olivine chemistry and petrographic evidence in order to distinguish between Apollo 14 impact-generated olivine vitrophyres and pristine mare basalts. Thus, we conducted textural and chemical analyses of vitrophyre and basalt samples from breccia 14321 (Table 1). Table 1: Details of samples analyzed in this study. *Basalt “groups” were previously determined by [8] based on compositional differences