Moon dust collected during Apollo 11 mission rediscovered after four decades

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Moon dust samples collected by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 moon mission have been rediscovered in a California lab warehouse

Four decades after mysteriously disappearing, twenty vials of moon dust samples collected by Neil Armstrong during the historic Apollo 11 mission have resurfaced in a storage facility belonging to a California laboratory.

Karen Nelson, an archivist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found the forgotten vacuum-sealed glass jars containing the precious dust samples from our lunar satellite - underneath a layer of Earth dust which had settled on the vials over the past 43 years.

Following the successful return of the Apollo 11 crew to Earth on July 24,1969, NASA distributed the lunar dust samples to laboratories around the world for examination. Despite asking for them to be returned afterwards, NASA noted that several vials had gone missing, assuming that they had been destroyed in the lab experiments.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory officials said that they were "surprised" that the moon dust samples were in the facility, and that they did not know how and when the samples had been placed in lab's storage warehouse.

The samples were originally meant for examination to determine whether the moon may have harboured carbon-based lifeforms in the past. As a number of laboratories found no such evidence, the dust samples' importance diminished rapidly - which may have been the reason for them to be put away in storage.

Perhaps the rediscovered samples may be worth another analysis - who knows what scientists may be able to find, now that technology has moved on by more than four decades?

Image Credit: NASA / Buzz Aldrin