Lost Apollo 11 Moon Dust Found in Storage

You find the craziest stuff during spring cleaning. Like lost Apollo 11 moon dust.

Lost Apollo 11 moon dust was found in a lab warehouse in California last month. It had been sitting in storage for over 40 years.

The vials of moon dust were brought back to Earth by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men on the moon.

Karen Nelson, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory archivist, found the dust when she was going over artifacts at the facility, said "We don't know how or when they ended up in storage.”

The samples should have been sent to NASA after the Space Sciences Laboratory team finished studying them, but they were stored instead. Nelson contacted Space Sciences Laboratory officials after making the find. She said "They were surprised we had the samples.”

Nelson found 20 vials packed in a vacuum-sealed glass jar with simple handwritten labels dated "24 July 1970." Along with the jar was an academic paper published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971, titled "Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples."

The writers of paper were all from the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. They included Melvin Calvin, Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Calvin helped NASA on in their efforts to protect the moon from possible contamination that might have occurred during the first lunar landing. Calvin also assisted NASA on efforts to protect Earthlings from pathogens that might have been hiding in the lunar dust.

The Apollo astronauts brought 842 pounds of moon samples to Earth between 1969 and 1972. NASA thought all the samples were accounted for. Ryan Zeigler, NASA’s Apollo sample curator at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, said the space agency assumed that the missing 18 grams were destroyed during the experiments. He said in an email “Given the lengths taken to preserve the samples, this does not appear to have been an attempt of deliberate deception, but likely a miscommunication where some of the material was retained for ongoing or expected future studies which never happened. Why they were never returned is unclear. I do not know whether these samples will be studied again, but this sample (10059) is a very interesting Apollo 11 breccia that is in short supply, so I believe there is a good chance that this material could be used to fill future requests for this sample.”

The vials are back in NASA's sample vault. For now, they could one day wind up back in a lab.

by Tony Sokol