NASA to Cal Lab: Send Back Moon Samples

A couple months shy of 44 years since Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first and second men, respectively, to walk on the surface of the moon July 20, 1969, a laboratory in California says it's found moon dust samples collected during the mission.

Archivist Karen Nelson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory --- which is managed by and overlooks the campus of the University of California, Berkeley --- said back in April she discovered about 20 vials of the moon dust in storage.

The vials had handwritten labels dated "24 July 1970" and were "vacuumed sealed in a glass jar," Nelson was quoted saying in a report by The Space Reporter. She added no one at the lab knows how or when the vials ended up in the storage, or why no one remembered to send the samples back to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The whys and wherefores of the tardy return seem not to matter to NASA administrators, who have already issued a new call for the moon dust to be sent back to them.

However, the space agency has apparently also told Nelson she has permission to take the vials out of the vacuumed sealed jar for closer inspection.

Back in 1969, soon after Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins returned to Earth, moon dust samples were sent for experimentation to about 150 laboratories across the globe, including the Space Sciences Laboratory on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NASA lent out the dust samples with only one stipulation: that they be returned after the selected labs no longer needed them for experimentation and papers.

Of course, Berkeley's allotment somehow got lost in the scientific shuffle.

Nelson reported that, in addition to the moon dust samples, she also found a copy of the paper "Study of the carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples," which, according to the laboratory, was co-authored by Melvin Calvin, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner and a former associate director of the lab.

Nelson said she discovered the moon dust samples after being asked to clear some of Calvin's equipment out of the lab's storage area.