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HOUSTON — The first person to set foot on the moon had one last task before he came home.
Neil Armstrong needed to pick up rocks — as many as he could carry, as interesting as he could find. The material he collected would constitute humanity’s first samples taken from another world.
With less than 10 minutes to go before the end of his
moonwalk, Armstrong used tongs to pile about 20 rocks into a specialized collection box. Deciding it wasn’t full enough, he scooped an additional 13 pounds of lunar soil into the container.
Today, a tablespoon of that soil sits in a sealed dish in a locked and windowless lab at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It is a prized piece of the Apollo program’s greatest scientific legacy: nearly 850 pounds of moon rocks.
For 50 years, research on these rocks has transformed our understanding of the moon, revealing the circumstances of its birth and the reasons for its mottled face. Now, NASA has decided to release three new samples for analysis — samples that no scientist has touched.
The upcoming experiments, on vacuum-sealed cores and a long-frozen rock, can be performed only once, at the precise moment the samples are opened. That’s why the materials have been held back since they were retrieved from the moon, said Ryan Zeigler, who curates the Apollo rocks collection. NASA was waiting for the right scientists, with the right technologies, at the right time.
With Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary this year and renewed interest in the moon ahead of a
proposed return mission, Zeigler said, the right time is now.
NASA’s Lunar Sample Laboratory, a maze of gleaming metal cabinets and spotless linoleum floors, was built in the 1970s to house the rocks brought back from six moon missions.
A sophisticated HVAC system, designed to keep the air 1,000 times cleaner than in the outside world, fills the facility with a faint artificial breeze. Scientists enter only after donning special white jumpsuits, caps and booties to limit contamination.
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