Does Lanzarote look so much like the Moon? They would be amazed at Apollo 14

Since NASA and ESA astronauts began training in its volcanic cinder fields in 2017, Lanzarote's "lunar landscape" has gone from being a commonplace to a scientific promise, but is this Canary Island really that similar to the Moon? So much so, that its rocks are identical to those collected by Apollo 14.

And the discovery is important because, sooner or later, man will establish a base on the Moon and, to do so, he must first know what he can do with the materials that cover its surface: can they be used to build a shelter or a road? Can you sow in those soils? Is it possible to extract oxygen and water for the astronauts? Do they contain fuel suitable for their ships (helium)? Can they provide materials such as iron, titanium or chromium?

In reality, man already has at his disposal rocks brought directly from the Moon, thanks, above all, to NASA's Apollo program of the seventies, but they are so scarce and valuable that it is inconceivable to experiment with them on a large scale.

For this reason, scientific groups from all over the planet are looking for places on the planet that not only resemble the Moon or Mars (the second objective of the new era of the space race), but also have soils with the same physical-chemical properties.

Teams from the United States, Japan and China have published several of these "analogues" in recent years, but in some cases they come from places with very few "lunar" resources and, in others, their rocks only resemble those of the terrestrial satellite, but have little to do in chemical and petrological terms. They are useless.

In the latest issue of "Scientific reports", a journal of the "Nature" group, four researchers from the Geosciences Institute of the CSIC (IGEO), the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands (Involcan) publish a new analogue of the Moon that would have left Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell speechless because its rocks are identical to the regolith they stepped on, the characteristic mineral "carpet" of the lunar surface.

On February 5, 1971, Sephard and Mitchell landed in the highlands of Fra Mauro, the place where the lunar module of the failed Apollo 13 mission should have landed ten months earlier. They spent 33 and a half hours on the Moon, nine of them on "walks" on the surface, and brought back to Earth 33.5 kilos of rocks.

Fernando Alberquilla (IGEO-UCM), Jesús Martínez Frías (IGEO-Involcan), Valentín García Baonza (IGEO-UCM) and Rosario Lunar (IGEO) have compared the known physical-chemical, mineralogical and morphological properties of these Fra Mauro rocks with the basalt samples they have collected in the Peñas de Tao, in Lanzarote.

And their conclusion is that they are practically identical, or in technical terms: there is "a strong correlation (between the Peñas de Tao and Fra Mauro), not only in mineralogical and geochemical terms, but also in their physical properties".

Which, they add, opens a new field of research in which, for example, tests to extract oxygen from basalt oxides, tests on the potential of these volcanic soils of the Peñas de Tao as a construction material or experiments with them aimed at knowing how to sow and cultivate on the Moon will fit.