Not really lunar field work, but perhaps the closest thing to it. I have traveled to the lunar curatorial facility several times in the last few years with Benjamin Weiss (MIT), David Shuster (BGC) and others working with us. While there we select samples and help prepare our allocations with the friendly laboratory personnel. The facility is a wonderful place to visit.
Photo: selecting small anorthositic breccias, collected from the rim of North Ray Crater on the Cayley Plains (Apollo 16).
Lonar Crater is one of the only known impact craters in basalt, making it a perfect analog for studying how craters form on the Moon and Mars. For this reason, and because of its relatively young age (~50,000 years), Lonar was used to help prepare for the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s. In 2005 Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay (Harvard), Benjamin Weiss (MIT), and Adam Maloof (Princeton) organized an interdisciplinary field trip to study the structure, formation, and paleomagnetic history of the crater. I joined a follow-up trip in 2006 to help find impact melt glass that would have recorded the ambient magnetic field just after impact. After roaming the beautiful, perpetually sunny countryside for several days, I found a huge number of macroscopic impact glasses. These samples will help us understand the magnetic remanence of similar glasses from the Moon, and also complement the other Lonar science objectives.
Photo: myself standing near the crater rim.
Led by John Grotzinger (Caltech), David Mohrig (U. Texas, Austin), and John Southard (MIT Emeritus), a group of about 10 MIT students visited the White Sands National Monument in March 2005 to use the site as an analog for the Mars Opportunity Rover landing site. This large gypsum dune field is ideal for studying the aeolian transport and water-induced cementation of sulfate salts that are believed to have created many of the sedimentary rocks at Meridiani Planum. I helped survey the topography of the interdune areas and a wonderful structure known as a yardang. I also collected lots of gypsum particles for a size-distribution analysis (see Doug Jerolmack et al.'s paper, JGR 111, E12S02). Ironically, NASA also stores some lunar samples at White Sands.
Photo: White Sands National Monument in the afternoon.
Several islands in Penobscot Bay have excellent exposures of a period intrusive volcanism about 400 My ago. In June of 2007 a group from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute traveled by sail boat to visit some of these exposures over the course of a week.
Photo: Layered gabbro on the shore of Isle au Haut.
Barringer Crater is one of the best preserved young impact craters in the world (another good one being Lonar Crater, above). I organized a trip to the crater in January of 2008 for both educational purposes and to collect some high resolution images of the crater walls (with a collaborator).
Photo: on the rim just after enduring a short-lived white-out snow storm.