Sky & Telescope - July 2019 - 16

The Moon: First Lunar Samples

p SIGN HERE PLEASE Upon arrival in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory
in Houston, scientists were met with a table of paperwork along with
their samples.

mineralogist and X-ray diffraction expert who was already at
SAO. I also hired Janice Bower, a remarkably adept and adaptable graduate of Wentworth Institute of Technology, to operate and service the instrument critical to much of our work,
called an electron probe microanalyzer. Electron probes reveal
the chemical makeup of mineral samples by analyzing the
X-rays created when the samples are bombarded by a beam of
accelerated electrons in a vacuum. Together, we ﬁve would be
the SAO lunar sample team.

Precious Vials
When I arrived in a windowless room at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, I found several fellow PIs huddled
around a table covered with sample vials and paperwork.
Along with the NASA research grant each of us was awarded,
the paperwork included much legalistic detail about my
responsibility to safeguard my samples: They were not mine,
I was only borrowing them from NASA. (I had already taken
steps to have a small safe installed in my lab, bolted through
its bottom to the concrete ﬂoor.)
At last I received two polyethylene cylinders, each about
ﬁve inches tall, containing my group's lunar samples. Opening these, I found packing material and two much smaller
plastic vials, labeled 10085,24 and 10084,108. The ﬁrst
contained 11 grams of coarse lunar ﬁnes, larger than 1 millimeter in size and mostly smaller than 2 mm. The second
held 5 grams of "ﬁne ﬁnes," particles smaller than 1 mm in
diameter. The LRL curatorial staff had sieved the bulk soil
sample collected by the astronauts into these fractions. With
NASA's concerns about security fresh in my mind, I borrowed
a needle and thread from one of the secretaries in the room
16

J U LY 2 0 1 9 * S K Y & T E L E S C O P E

and sewed both small vials into one pocket of my sports
jacket for the trip home.
I boarded an Eastern Airlines ﬂight to Boston with a
stopover in Washington, D.C. In the plane I found a half
dozen or so other scientist friends and acquaintances who
were also ﬂying home to Boston or D.C. with lunar samples
they had picked up in Houston. We were all psyched and had
much high-spirited conversation in the plane's aisle. We were
probably obnoxiously loud. All this made me very warm, so I
tore off my jacket and stuffed it in an overhead bin. Not until
much later did I realize I had parted company with those two
precious vials. Fortunately they survived, or this would be a
very different story.
NASA's warnings about safety didn't forbid showing the
samples (carefully) to the public, and I couldn't resist inviting
my family, then our neighbors and their kids, to gaze up close
at pieces of the Moon. The next day I displayed them in our
lab for personnel at the Harvard Observatory and their families. Everyone was excited and curious, never mind the grains'
nondescript gray appearance.
When my group was ﬁnally alone with our lunar samples,
we examined them under a binocular microscope. To our
surprise, we found that not all of our regolith samples were
pulverized mineral dust, as I had pessimistically assumed.
The coarse-ﬁnes sample (10085,24) consisted of miniature
rocks, each with a distinctive texture and assemblage of
minerals. We had hundreds of separate lunar samples in our
tablespoonful! So we set to work to study as many of those
rock-ettes as we could in the time we had. It wasn't much:
NASA had decreed that on January 5, 1970, all of the lunar
sample investigators were to convene at the Albert Thomas

SA MPLE A RRIVA L: N ASA; PI HUDDLE: THE AU THOR

t HANDLE WITH CARE The first Apollo 11 samples, safe in their
protective packaging, arrive at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in
Houston on July 25, 1969.

Sky & Telescope - July 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - July 2019