A woman has found a treasure of out of this world proportions, as several vials of moon dust collected by the first men on the moon were rediscovered after sitting ignored for over 40 years. The priceless vials were discovered in California at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by archivist Karen Nelson, according to Fox News.
The moon dust were labeled with handwritten signs, and found alongside an academic paper stored with the collection that was published in 1971 published in Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971. The study was titled "Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples." The original vials were dated for July 24, 1970.
The paper deals with the lunar environmental effects the Apollo missions may have left, as well as discovering any hidden pathogens that could be deadly in the Moon's dust. Since its publication, the samples were returned, and then were lost within the confines of the laboratory. From there the vials remained untouched until Karen Nelson found them again recently.
"We don't know how or when they ended up in storage...They were surprised we had the samples,"
Between 1969 and 1972 Apollo astronauts on the Moon managed to bring back to Earth 842 pounds of samples of the Moon's dust and rocks, and for the most part those samples remain all accounted for. This discovery accounts for roughly three grams of lost material, which were originally thought to have been destroyed through testing. The samples will most likely be used again for research, according to NASA's Ryan Zeigler:
"I do not know whether these samples will be studied again, but this sample (10059) is a very interesting Apollo 11 breccia that is in short supply, so I believe there is a good chance that this material could be used to fill future requests for this sample,"