NASA Presentation Lorne Loudin, Keene State College. Summer of 2007, Summer Undergraduate Internship in Astrobiology (SUIA) at the the Goddard Center for Astrobiology.

From: http://astrobiology.gsfc.nasa.gov/main07.html "In the summer of 2007, the Goddard Center for Astrobiology hosted the fourth group of students for the Summer Undergraduate Internship in Astrobiology (SUIA) . As in the past, students were paired with mentors based on their research interests and spent a large majority of their time actually doing research. During the 10 week period, students toured several labs. The summer also included a visit to the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. Lorne Loudin (Keene State College) mentored by Drs. Richard Walker, Igor Puchtel, and Daniel Glavin, worked with the Walker group at the University of Maryland and was involved in the chemical analysis of highly siderophile elements in lunar impact melt breccias that resulted from the major basin-forming impacts. The objective of this work was to learn geochemical techniques for such measurements, then to acquire new results and compare them with the existing database for lunar, meteoritic and terrestrial samples. The abundance of highly siderophile elements (Re, Os, Ir, Ru, Pt, Pd, Rh & Au) was determined for three 200 milligram Apollo lunar sub-samples. These data show that: 1. breccia 76055 is most similar to Ordinary and Enstatite Chondrites on plots of 187 Os/ 188 Os vs. Pt/Ir; 2. 76055 overlaps the HSE data for the aphanite samples 73215 and 73255; 3. More than one chemical composition of an impactor can be inferred in the Serenitatis Basin (Puchtel et al. (in prep.), Norman et al.); 4. Some impact melts have HSE signatures that diverge from known chondritic values (Puchtel et al., in prep.). Organic analysis yielded minute trace levels of amino acid, consistent with previous studies of lunar soils (Glavin). No non-protein amino acids of extraterrestrial origin were identified (Glavin)."