Apollo 11 Moon Dust Sells at Auction for a Cool Half Million - Here's Astroguyz on the intriguing route the first sample return collected on the Moon took, from Apollo 11 to auction yesterday:
The sample bag itself was involved in several rounds of intrigue and legal battles over the years. First, when a collection of Apollo era artifacts went missing from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in 2003, the U.S. Marshall office seized the personal collection of then-Cosmosphere president Max Ary, to include the sample bag. The bag then went up for government auction as part of a court-ordered restitution.
In 2015, Chicago lawyer and space historian Nancy Lee Carlson came across the bag on a federal auction site, and placed successful a bid on it for $995. At the time, it was unknown that the bag was in fact from the Apollo 11 mission. Over the years, it had been mid-identified as belonging to Apollo 17—a mission which did not carry a contingency sample bag.
On a hunch, Carlson sent the bag off to NASA for verification. Planetary mineralogist Roy Christoffersen opened the bag, and actually managed to sample a small amount of lunar dust still clinging to the seams inside. The dust matched the composition of the Apollo 11 samples precisely, positively identifying the bag as Neil’s first historic sample collected on the Moon.
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