Space & Astronomy

Lost Apollo 11 samples found in warehouse

By T.K. Randall
May 27, 2013 ·  9 comments

Image Credit: NASA The discovery was made by archivist Karen Nelson who found several vials containing materials from the Apollo 11 Moon landing at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 20 vials in total containing dust and crushed up rock had been forgotten about in the labs archives for several decades. At the time of Armstrong and Aldrin's return, samples retrieved from the lunar surface had been sent to 150 laboratories around the world for study.

"We don't know how or when they ended up in storage," said Nelson. The vials were accompanied by a paper entitled 'Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples'. Oddly, it appears that the scientists studying the samples simply lost interest, placed them in storage and then forgot about them.[!gad]The discovery was made by archivist Karen Nelson who found several vials containing materials from the Apollo 11 Moon landing at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 20 vials in total containing dust and crushed up rock had been forgotten about in the labs archives for several decades. At the time of Armstrong and Aldrin's return, samples retrieved from the lunar surface had been sent to 150 laboratories around the world for study.

"We don't know how or when they ended up in storage," said Nelson. The vials were accompanied by a paper entitled 'Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples'. Oddly, it appears that the scientists studying the samples simply lost interest, placed them in storage and then forgot about them.

Source: CNET | Comments (9)

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