Samples of the first material ever brought back to Earth from another body in the universe – moon dust from the 1969 Apollo space flight – have been found sitting forgotten in a Berkeley Lab warehouse.
An archivist for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Karen Nelson, was reviewing and clearing out artifacts from the storage facility when she uncovered about 20 vials of moon dust collected by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, according to the lab.
"An archivist makes a cosmic discovery," CNET told its readers on May 25.
The vials – with handwritten labels saying “24 July 1970” – were found in a vacuum-sealed jar at the San Jose warehouse, the lab said.
Found with the vials was a copy of a scientific paper, “Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples,” by five co-authors from the Space Sciences Laboratory. One of them was chemistry Nobelist Melvin Calvin, then associate director of the Lawrence lab, who sought signs of extraterrestial life in the lunar samples, the lab said.
The moon dust was among many lunar samples from the 1969 Apollo flight distributed to 150 laboratories worldwide.
When Nelson contacted NASA about the tiny pieces of the moon found in the Berkeley Lab's warehouse, the space agency asked that it be sent back, the lab said.
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