MOONDB: IMPROVING ACCESS TO LUNAR SAMPLE DATA AND BEYOND

Nearly 50 years since the first lunar sample collection, the samples collected during the Apollo missions remain a unique and irreplaceable collection and an important legacy of the Apollo program. Curated at the NASA Johnson Space Center, these samples have been made available to the global community for a large number of studies that have generated a vast body of petrological, geochemical, and geochronological data. These data remain highly relevant for present and future science, helping to further unravel questions related to the formation of Earth-Moon and the inner solar system, cosmogenic nuclides, the history and effect of meteorite impact, and the study of planetary mantles. However, lunar sample data have been to a large extent inaccessible in a digital format that is easily reusable and that allows their full exploration for new science endeavors. MoonDB (www.moondb.org) is a NASA-funded data system that digitally restores and synthesizes lunar sample data from the literature, curating and preserving all available geochemical and petrological data and associated sample and analytical metadata, in order to ensure future utility. Larry Taylor was an early collaborator during the initial stages of MoonDB, and his scientific legacy is evident in the data system, where he is an author on nearly 40 papers. MoonDB’s interface allows users to easily find, filter, integrate, and download data and is accessible via machine-readable interfaces. MoonDB also serves as a repository for legacy and new datasets submitted by users to share their data and comply with funders’ and publishers’ data policies, and has created a comprehensive reference library related to lunar samples and meteorites. As of present, MoonDB contains major, trace, and isotope data for nearly 2,600 samples from approximately 650 references.

Currently, compositional data of lunar meteorites are being added to MoonDB as well as the geochronological data for both lunar samples and meteorites. Plans are underway to extend MoonDB to serve as a comprehensive data system for analytical data generated by the study of all astromaterials curated at NASA-JSC. The new Astromaterials Data System will facilitate the study of comparative planetology and for the first time provide the ability to compare analytical data across diverse extraterrestrial collections.