A lunar soil sample collection just begging to be stolen.
As it turns out, everyone wants to get their hands on a moon rock, some space dust, or some other kind of astronomy-related garbage. Grandma’s trying to sell stolen moon rocks at Denny’s, and governors are stealing them from the state they serve. Everybody wants a little taste of that moon glory, and it’s becoming a problem for NASA. Hundreds of NASA’s samples of moon rock and lunar dust have gone missing, and NASA’s records are a wreck as a result.
The biggest thieves aren’t politicians or the public, but scientists. Of the many moon rock samples given out by NASA, 12 were not returned when the researchers died or retired. Only 70 percent of scientists who received moon rock bothered to respond to NASA’s most recent lunar rock survey in 2008. Of those that did respond, the average time in which moon rock samples sat around not being used was a staggering 15 years, with one researcher sitting on his moon rocks for 35 years without bothering to do any research with them! To compound matters, NASA’s own record keeping sucks. The organization lists hundreds of destroyed samples as still existing.
Even accounting for NASA’s bad records, at least 517 moon rock samples have gone missing or been stolen.
“NASA is committed to the protection of our nation’s space-related artifacts, and sharing these treasures with outside researchers and the general public,” said NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown in a statement. NASA lists over 26,000 moon rocks, meteorites, and other “astromaterials” in its databases. “To put this in perspective, losses of Apollo samples have amounted to less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the returned samples over 40 years of intense research.”
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