Constraints on the impact history of the Apollo 16 landing site: Implications of soil-like breccia noble gas records

Abstract

The Apollo 16 regolith breccia sample suite provides a record of lunar regolith formation from the basin-forming epoch (~3.9 Ga) through to a time of declining impactor flux (~2 Ga). These rocks have been characterized into three groups: the “ancient,” “young,” and “soil-like” regolith breccias on the basis of their petrographic characteristics, and, in the case of the “ancient” and “young” regolith breccias, noble gas inventory. This study investigates the as-yet unexamined noble gas records of the “soil-like” regolith breccias to understand more recent regolith evolution processes that occurred at the Apollo 16 landing site. The range of gas concentrations measured for each noble gas in these samples is comparable to those previously reported for the local Apollo 16 soils. The “soil-like” regolith breccias were found to be more gas rich than the gas poor “young” and “ancient” regolith breccias, consistent with them having formed from comparatively mature soil(s). Our results further confirm the scientific value of lunar regolith breccias and bulk regolith samples as probes of the impact history and the space environment of the lunar surface across a wide range of time.