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View Professor John Lovering's photo gallery
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Professor John Lovering was interviewed in 2010 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series.
By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin
to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge and view science as a human endeavour. These interviews specifically tie into the Australian Curriculum sub-strand 'Nature and development of science'.
The following summary of Lovering's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers' notes. The extract discusses Lovering's investigation of lunar rocks. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
John Francis Lovering was born in Sydney in 1930. After finishing at Canterbury Boys High School, Lovering accepted a New South Wales cadetship at the Australian Museum to attend the University of Sydney. He graduated in 1951 with a BSc (Hons) and began work as assistant curator of Mineralogy and Petrology at the Australian Museum (1951-55). Meanwhile, Lovering completed an MSc (1953) at the University of Sydney on the stratigraphy of the Sydney Basin. In 1953 Lovering went to work at Caltech in the USA on the trace element content of iron meteorites. While at Caltech, Lovering worked towards his PhD which was awarded in 1956.
Lovering returned to Australia to take up a position as research fellow (1956-60), then fellow (1960-64) and finally senior fellow (1964-69) in Geophysics and Geochemistry at the Australian National University. While here, Lovering worked on the use of electron microprobes to determine the chemical composition of minerals. In 1969 he became professor of geology (1969-87) and head of the School of Earth Sciences (1975-87) at the University of Melbourne. Lovering's work with electron microprobes won him the right to investigate the lunar rock samples recently brought to Earth in the Apollo 11 mission. During this time he also served as dean of the Faculty of Science (1983-85) and deputy vice-chancellor (research) (1985-87), as well as being a member of the Australian Antarctic Research Expeditions in 1978 and 1987. In 1987 Lovering was made emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne and moved to Adelaide to become vice-chancellor and professor of geology at Flinders University (1987-95).
In addition to his research work, Lovering served on a number of committees, advisory boards and professional societies including the Royal Society of Victoria (1977-78), Geological Society of Australia (1978-80), Australian National Commission for UNESCO (1979-85), Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council (1984-85), Australian Geoscience Council (1985-86), Marine Research Allocations Advisory Committee (1985-86), UNESCO International Geological Correlation Programme (1985-87), Antarctic Science Advisory Committee (1985-89), International Union of Geological Sciences (1990-96), Natural Resources Council of South Australia (1992-94), Murray-Darling Basin Commission (1994-99), Environment Conservation Council (1998), Australian National Seismic Imaging Resource (1998), National Heritage Trust Advisory Committee (1998-99), Gippsland Research Coordination Group (1999) and the International Centre of Excellence in Water Resource Management (2003-06).
Professor Lovering has received both national and international awards including; Chevalier des Palmes Académiques (1981), officer of the Order of Australia (1993) and Doctor of Science honoris causa from both Flinders University (1995) and the University of Melbourne (1999). Lovering was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1982.
Moon rock analysis
So you were getting back material from the moon and examining it; what exactly were you looking for?
Actually getting the material was exciting too because I had to go across and pick up the first samples from Apollo 11 myself. They didn't want to send it by any other process. I went over there; we went to the lunar lab in Houston and Cape Canaveral and they brought me into this room and brought out these samples of moon rock. We couldn't touch them at the time, but you could have them in their containers. Remember, they put it into quarantine for a couple of weeks, until they decided that it wasn't going to give us all some terrible disease. When I actually saw the stuff and handled it, they had just got it out of quarantine. Suddenly, you could see, 'God, it's basalt; it's nothing.' There were breccias as well, broken-up rock; but the really fresh stuff was this wonderful lunar basalt. Like anything you could have seen on earth. At least in a hand specimen it looked like the basalt you get all around Melbourne. There was nothing exciting, until you started to look in detail and then you could see all the differences of a lunar environment. But just seeing that thing was quite unbelievable.
Even the chemistry of these rocks was different, wasn't it?
The basic chemistry was just like a basaltic rock on Earth, but there were differences. One of the major ones was that they were very high in titanium, so there were lots of ilmenite and titanium minerals in the basalts. But we did a lot of work, as did a lot of other people, on the chemistry of the lunar rocks, the mineralogy and the detail of it all. We know a great deal about the detail of it and how it all fits together in many ways. But, in some ways, we knew it all then anyway; we knew more about it than we did about the Earth, in some respects.
One interesting thing was that two minerals were found on the moon, just moon minerals, and one we found in our group here in Australia; this was a mineral that we called tranquillityite, after the Sea of Tranquillity. There was another little competitive bit here that you might be interested in. We used to have these lunar conferences where once a year we would all get together in Houston and everybody would give talks on all the stuff they had found the year before. These were people from all over the world, all of the groups involved in this stuff. Everybody was trying to show how clever they were with all the clever things they had found. There was this mineral—little tiny things that were no more than 50 micrometres long and sort of 20 wide, tiny grains tucked away interstitially between the major mineral grains in the basalts. There was this little phase we found. I won't go into the detail of how we found it, but we analysed it in great detail. We got CSIRO people to come in with us. They managed to pick out these little tiny grains and we were able to determine the structure of it all in great detail.
We went across to the moon rock conferences and started to listen to what was going on. A lot of people found there was this mineral, but they didn't know what it was. They had the chemistry, they had some good analyses of it, but nobody had done the structure, except for our group, through CSIRO people. We were able to beat the lot of them in terms of knowing all about it and characterising it. So we got to name it and the American groups got quite irritated; nevertheless, we had the data. We all joined together on a paper—I think there were something like 20odd people on this paper—but we were the lead authors and we got to name 'tranquillityite'.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. These activities align with the Australian Curriculum strand ‘Science Inquiry Skills’ and the New South Wales syllabus Stage 4 Science outcomes 4.9.3 and 4.9.6 and Stage 6 Earth and Environmental Science outcome 8.3.1. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
basalt
grain
lunar
mineral
mineralogy
moon rock
tranquillityite
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