NASA opens ‘new’ moon sample brought to Earth in 1972 and kept sealed for 50 years

It was designed by Alex Meshik, Olga Pravdivtseva, and Rita Parai of Washington University in St. Louis. Francesca McDonald of the European Space Agency (ESA) led a team that built the special instrument to gently pierce the lunar steel tube without escaping gas.

Together they have created and carefully tested a unique system to collect the extremely valuable material – both gaseous and solid – which is sealed in the container.

On February 11, the team began the painstaking month-long process of extracting the steel from the pipe by first removing the protective outer sheath and trapping the gas that would be inside.

Zeigler and his team knew what gases were to be in the outer vent and everything went according to plan. The tube did not appear to contain “moon gas”, indicating that the inner tube seal was probably still intact.

On February 23, the team embarked on the next stage: a week-long process of puncturing the inner tube and slowly collecting the lunar gases that were hopefully still inside the tube. .

Once gas extraction is complete, the ARES team will prepare to carefully remove soil and rocks from the tube, likely later this spring.

Now that ANGSA 73001 has literally been mined, there are only 3 unopened lunar samples left, one of which is also vacuum sealed on the moon. When will these samples be opened?

“I doubt they’ll wait another 50 years,” curator Zeigler said. But it would be interesting, he added, to be able to compare these samples directly with the samples that the astronauts of the Artemis program will bring back from the moon. NASA predicts that Artemis will bring humans back to the Moon by 2025.

This article is based on a NASA press release and a telex from the Agence France Presse news agency.