NASA loses lunar rocks

NASA has lost at least 517 moon rocks, meteorites and comet dust samples since 1970, according to a new report by the agency’s Inspector General.

According to USA Today:

Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide.

The IG audited about one quarter of the 26,000 samples the agency has loaned, The Associated Press reported.

The audit found that 11 of the 59 scholars who’d borrowed these space artifacts – that’s 19 percent – could not find all of their loaners, Space.com reported.

"The [Astromaterials Acquisition and] Curation Office did not ensure that these loaned research samples were efficiently used and promptly returned to NASA," Inspector General Paul K. Martin wrote in the report, according to Space.com. "For example, we learned of one researcher who still had lunar samples he had borrowed 35 years ago on which he had never conducted research."

In one case, when NASA contacted the astronomical observatory at the University of Delaware to get back a disk of moon rocks and moon dust it had loaned to the facility 30 years before, staff said the observatory manager had died and no one knew where it was. A trustee of the observatory told the AP that the manager returned the lunar sample in the 1990s, but NASA maintains he did not.

The audit found 12 researchers "who had died, retired or relocated" before returning their now-vanished samples, USA Today reported.

"NASA is committed to the protection of our nation's space-related artifacts, and sharing these treasures with outside researchers and the general public," NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said in a statement, Space.com reported. "We agree with the recommendations contained in the recently released Inspector General report examining NASA's controls over loans of moon rocks and other astromaterials to researchers and educators. Actions will mostly result in changes to loan agreements and inventory control procedures."

Robert Pearlman, editor of online publication collectSPACE.com, told Space.com that researchers’ carelessness with lunar souvenirs could indicate that scientists no longer view them as rare or historically significant artifacts. "It seems that the moon, or at least its exploration by humans, has lost some of its shine over the past four decades,” he said.

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