The Secrets of Moondust
Lunar samples, untouched by Earth’s atmosphere for decades, will soon emerge from a NASA vault.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.
There are a few rules for handling pieces of the moon collected by Apollo astronauts. Keep the samples locked in a safe. Don’t blab to everyone that you have some. Don’t destroy them, unless you’ve been given permission; sometimes, in the name of science, the samples must be dissolved in acid. And, most important, don’t sneeze.
“If you sneeze,” says Alex Sehlke, a geologist at NASA, “it’s gone.”
When most scientists today study lunar samples from the Apollo era, they aren’t working with hefty boulders or even rocks. Their samples come in small vials, in the form of dust, with particles about the size of grains of
