Whoops: Moon Dust From Apollo 11 Lost In Storage For Years
Moon Dust Marilee Bailey The dust was rediscovered last month in a UC Berkeley warehouse. You'd think moon dust would be something people would keep an eye on since, you know, you have to go to the freaking moon to get it. But somehow, samples retrieved from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission got lost--probably for years--in a University of California, Berkeley, archive until they were found again last month. Archivist Karen Nelson found 20 vials of the stuff, labeled "24 July 1970," while clearing out a Berkeley warehouse last month. (Hard not to imagine the warehouse that shows up at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Along with the samples was a 1971 paper that examined the samples for carbon. It's not clear exactly how long they were stuck in storage, but the samples--sent to 150 U.S. labs after the moon mission--should've been returned to NASA after testing. Nelson,...