Berkeley Lab archivist Karen Nelson holds lunar samples used by Melvin Calvin for scientific experiments 43 years ago. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)
When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide. One of those was the Space Sciences Laboratory in Latimer Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. After experiments were conducted and papers published, those samples should have been sent back to NASA. Instead they wound up in storage, where they sat collecting dust until they were discovered more than four decades later. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) archivist Karen Nelson uncovered the moon dust-about 20 vials with handwritten labels and dated "24 July 1970"-last month while reviewing and clearing out artifacts from Berkeley Lab's warehouse. "They were vacuum sealed in a glass jar," said Nelson, who has worked in Berkeley Lab's Archives and Records Office for 17 years. "We don't know how or when they ended up in storage." Along with the jar was a copy of the paper "Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples," published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971.
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