CULLOWHEE, N.C. — Western Carolina University Professor Amy Fagan is making her mark in the field of lunar science. 

“It's a professional obsession of mine with the moon and planetary science, but it's also a bit of a hobby to collect these very random toys and then kind of populate my office,” Fagan said. “The feeling that I get is, oh yeah, this is definitely my space!”

Pieces of history, the present and future fill up her office in Cullowhee, in western North Carolina.

“I was actually studying Apollo samples, so samples that the Apollo crew brought back of lunar meteorites,” Fagan said. “That's mostly what I would work with, and they're very, very small samples. What we do is we actually send them off, and somebody else cuts them; they get sliced very thinly and put on a glass slide. When you have that, you can actually look at it through the microscope.”

Fagan’s currently working on a new initiative for a NASA instrument suite, called DIMPLE, to help uncover mysteries of the moon. The proposal was selected in July 2023. 

“A payload or an instrument suite that has been selected through the payloads and research investigations on the surface of the moon program,” Fagan said. “So PRISM program through NASA and this was in the third round of this program that DIMPLE was selected”

DIMPLE stands for “dating an irregular mare patch with a lunar explorer.”

“Dimple is going to go to a very specific irregular patch,” she said.

Her team wants to determine how far back a specific area of the moon goes.

“It's going to go to one named Ina, and through that payload, through that instrument suite there, the objectives are to date it. So how old is it? Is it on the order of over 3 billion years old, which would be similar to the ages of the other basalts on the lunar surface, or is it less than 100 million years old?” she said.

Another question that remains is what Ina’s material is made of.

“One way that we're going to be looking at that is actually using camera systems. So the samples are not coming back to Earth. They’re staying on the surface of the moon,” Fagan said.

The answers from this initiative could lead to more knowledge about the origins of the moon.

“All those little circles are all impact craters from meteorites and small asteroids, things like that. But overall it's actually still pretty smooth, right? If it was three and a half billion years old, why is it that we don't have as many impact craters?” she said.

The delivery date for DIMPLE to the moon is scheduled for 2027.