Apollo 11 lunar dust particles for auction

Samples of lunar dust collected by Neil Armstrong in Apollo 11’s historic mission in 1969 will be auctioned on Wednesday in New York City.

The auction item, which includes five samples of lunar dust, is a rare piece of space history and could be worth up to $1.2 million, according to Bonhams, the auction house handling the sale. These dust samples have had a semi-wild and controversial journey and will be the only known lunar dust samples to be legally sold after being validated by NASA.

“There has never been a verified Apollo moon sample put up for auction, so we are delighted and excited,” said Adam Stackhouse, a specialist at Bonhams who is overseeing the sale of the History of Space. Honored to offer this.

The beads for sale can be found in a blue plastic container on top of five aluminum discs, each covered with a small piece of carbon tape used to pick up lunar dust from the collection bag. On July 21, 1969, after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. becoming the first man to set foot on the moon, Armstrong collected a small “backup sample” of lunar dust before carrying out his remaining planned operations on the lunar surface, according to NASA protocol. The idea was that if the mission needed to be cut short for any reason, Armstrong and Aldrin would be able to return to Earth with the backup sample towed.

According to NASA, at the end of the Apollo 11 mission, the bag – largely empty but still speckled with particles of lunar matter – was on loan at a space museum in Kansas. It was later seized by the US Marshals Service after Max Ary, director of what was then known as the Kansas Atmospheric and Space Center, had in 2005 was convicted of stealing and selling antiquities belongs to the museum and NASA.

In 2015, the United States Police Department sold the bag in an auction, where it was sold Bought along with several other space artifacts for $995 by an Illinois attorney and a geology enthusiast named Nancy Lee Carlson.

Carlson sent the collection bag to NASA that same year to authenticate its provenance. The space agency verified that the artifact was real and declared that it belonged to the government, refusing to return it.

Carlson sued NASA, and in 2016 a federal judge ruled that the bag should not have been auctioned, but in fact, Carlson legally purchased it.

Carlson sold the bag in 2017 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York for $1.8 million. Now, Carlson is looking to sell samples of lunar dust collected from bags during NASA tests.

Stackhouse says the purchase has attracted interest because of its connection to a pivotal moment in history and because of its unusual plot.

“It was a real journey from the time it was collected in 1969 until it reached our facility,” he said.

Stackhouse added that Bonhams has not heard from officials at NASA, and said the space agency does not have any legal right to halt the purchase. NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to the moon dust samples, Bonhams . Space History Discount includes a fragment from Sputnik-1, which was launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 and became the first artificial satellite in Earth orbit. According to Bonhams, the recovered missile is worth between $80,000 and $120,000.

Other artifacts up for auction include the first US-made simulation of a satellite orbiting the Earth, valued at between $40,000 and $60,000, and a map of the moon signed by the 15 Apollo astronauts, the former General President Richard Nixon and Wernher Von Braun, famous architects of the United States space program. According to Bonhams, the map is worth $20,000 to $30,000.

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here