Katherine Joy: The Science of the Moon

Katherine Joy obtained her PhD in studies of lunar evolution and was involved in the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 mission to the Moon. She recently co-led the first UK team to recover meteorite samples from Antarctica, working with the British Antarctic Survey to recover rocks from space.

The Moon has been the subject of great fascination for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1950’s and 1960’s when we sent orbiting and landing spacecraft to explore its surface that we made giant leaps forward to understand its origin and evolution. Our knowledge is still growing with state of the art cameras capturing photographs of features down to only a few metres in size, and geophysics missions measuring the state of the lunar crust in never before seen detail.

Katherine Joy discussed how our knowledge from space missions and laboratory work back here on our pale blue dot has been integrated to develop an understanding of the Moon as a complex geological body. She is currently funded by the Royal Society.