It’s Not Just a Phase: Over 50 Years of Lunar Sample Science

Landed robots, rovers, and orbital spacecraft provide regional-scale information about the nature of the Moon’s surface, but such data require ground truth information made accessible through lunar samples. Such samples include a range of material including hand-specimen-sized rocks, pieces of rocks chipped from boulders by astronauts wielding geologic hammers, to soil—scooped, trenched, and drilled from the upper few meters of the Moon’s surface by robots as well as humans. This chapter provides an overview of recent discoveries made using the lunar sample collection, highlights outstanding questions about the Moon’s origin and evolution, and discusses how these knowledge gaps will be addressed by future sample return missions.