Word: dusts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks, have probably been scrutinized more closely than any other material in the history of man. Special, clean, sealed laboratories, some far cleaner and more sophisticated than those at Harvard, have been built all over the world for the sole purpose of studying a few pounds of lunar dust and rock...
...July 28, 1969, Frondel opened the first box of lunar samples as the world waited, open-mouthed, for his verdict. The world was disappointed. Immediate sight identification was made impossible by the adherent lunar dust covering and hiding the rocks. Frondel later remarked that the rocks were so covered with dust that, "You couldn't tell if they were Swiss cheese or granite...
After the rocks and dust were separated, in addition to undergoing the preliminary mineralogical examination, they were put through an exhaustive series of tests to ensure that they carried no organisms which might be harmful to man. During this time the samples were in complete isolation. Although there have been numerous incidents of isolation chamber leakage, most have been minor. The one major leak occurred during the quarantine of the Apollo 12 samples and required Frondel to enter quarantine for two weeks himself. Failure to find the lunar samples biologically dangerous has led to the quarantine being abandoned...
...level volcanic seas or mares of the Apollo 11 and 12 landing sites cover much of the near side of the moon and provided the first lunar samples. Here the volcanic bedrock has been repeatedly hit by meteorites and broken up so that a layer of broken rock and dust from 6 to 20 feet deep lies on the surface. Some of these rocks have been lying on the surface directly exposed to space for several million years, while the top inch of soil has been relatively unmixed for the last several hundred million years...
...move, now mountains are being made, volcanoes erupt periodically-all forming new rock. For the last three billion years (the age of the youngest lunar rock) the only apparent changes on the moon have been caused by meteorites. Constant impacting by meteorites has broken up the rock to form dust, compacted the dust to form rocks called breccia, and melted the rock sand dust to form glasses...