Vials of moon dust collected by the first men to walk on the moon have been discovered in storage in California after being missing for more than 40 years.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, NASA sent 68 grams of lunar dust to Melvin Calvin at the University of California at Berkeley.
Calvin, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in chemistry, split the sample
between his colleagues to study its carbon compounds, then gathered it
up to send back to NASA. Only 50 grams were returned. The remainder was
assumed to have been destroyed in the process of research.
But
somehow three grams of the dust ended up in 20 vials and packed in a
vacuum-sealed jar labeled with their contents and the date: July 24,
1970. The vials lay untouched until they were discovered in April in a
warehouse at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by archivist
Karen Nelson. They were accompanied by a paper about the lunar samples
that was published in the proceedings of a 1971 lunar science
conference.
Nelson returned the samples to NASA’s Lyndon B.
Johnson Space Center in Houston, where curator Ryan Zeigler says they
may still be scientifically useful. These samples came from a relatively
rare type of lunar soil called breccia, which is made up of a jumble of
different rocks, not the uniform basalt that was more common at the
Apollo 11 landing site.
“Only 25 percent of the numbered samples brought back by the Apollo 11 mission are breccias,” Zeigler says.
He
stresses that he doesn’t think there was any foul play in the
misplacement of the samples. “I have a feeling [Calvin] just forgot
about them,” he says.
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