This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.The Apollo missions brought back 842 pounds of rock and soil from the moon... nearly 2200 different samples.But there's one sample that planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa says is the most interesting of all: "Apollo 1-0-0-8-5."Neil Armstrong collected it on Apollo 11."He was about to step back into the lunar module and he turned aroundand had this rock box and he saw little spaces in thereand he knew that these geologists on earth would be just so excited to study these materials,he just scooped up I think nine scoops of soil that he put into the box."It became one of the most well studied samples of the Apollo missions, she says.And a geologist named John Wood, at the Smithsonian, noticed white flecks of rock in the soil...which he identified as a rock type called anorthosite.And it clued him in to the moon's ancient past."And this was quite a leap of imagination but he proposed that the whole of the moon had at one time in the past,you know, somewhere close to 4.5 billion years ago, been almost covered with a global magma ocean. You know, an ocean of lava.And so this was a revolutionary idea at the time.Because people had thought the moon had formed cold,so it completely changed our idea how the moon formed, how the terrestrial planets formed, like the Earth as well.You know, it really changed a lot about our understanding of planetary science."But Wadhwa has a second―and more personal―reason to appreciate this sample.