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NASA
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By Victoria Jaggard
Sticky dust. A shady museum director. A lawsuit against NASA. These are just some of the unusual players in a drama that started in 1969 and culminated this week at a New York City auction house.
The dust comes from the first sample astronaut Neil Armstrong scooped up from the surface of the moon during Apollo 11 (pictured above, fellow Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin). Normally NASA is highly protective of any lunar samples from the Apollo missions, even conducting a sting operation outside a Denny’s to get back a piece of moon rock. But due to a string of bizarre events, five samples of moon dust ultimately became some of the few bits of Apollo material that can be sold legally; they went to a bidder Wednesday at auction for a little more than $500,000.
Space scientists have had mixed reactions to the sale, as Maya Wei-Haas reports. “The obligatory response is that every sample is important and can tell you something new,” Baylor University’s Peter James told her. NASA, however, only got to analyze this dust when they verified its authenticity, and the grains are only a small fraction of the lunar samples the agency holds for scientific study. Still, pristine bits of the moon are not easy to come by on Earth, other experts contend. Meanwhile, space lawyers are intrigued by what this sale might mean for future attempts to extract and use resources from space—an issue that is already stirring debate.
Read the full story here.
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