How Well Do We Know Our Moon?

Leonard David wrote in Space.Com that Earth’s moon is “still a puzzle” – “luna incognita,” he calls it, hoping for a new corps of discovery to go back.  Surprisingly, the treasure trove of Apollo data has “been sitting around and never properly studied,”  especially since the development of more highly sophisticated analytical techniques.  Carl Pieters (Brown U) has listed some of his questions:

Has the enormous lunar south pole Aitken Basin on the Moon’s farside excavated into the lunar mantle?
What happened in the first few hundred million years to cause the lunar nearside to be so very different from the farside?
What caused the pockets of iron-rich materials in the primitive crust?
What are the deposits near the lunar poles and what other possible resources have we missed?

Even the origin of the moon is an open question, despite the “current consensus” of the impact model.  The article gives space to one maverick who doesn’t believe it: Paul Lowman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.  “A lot had to happen very fast.  I have trouble grasping that,” he said.  “You have to do too much geologically in such a short time after the Earth and the Moon formed.  Frankly, I think the origin of the Moon is still an unsolved problem, contrary to what anybody will tell you,” the article quotes Lowman.
    The moon is becoming a popular target again.  The European Space Agency is already there with SMART-1.  Missions from Japan, China, India and the United States are planning to fill in the many gaps in our understanding of our nearest celestial neighbor.

We do science a disfavor when we think we know the answers or let a consensus lull us into complacency.  Question the textbooks; dig through the treasure trove of data, and be willing to think independently.