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NASA Missing Hundreds of Moon Rocks

Posted by Soulskill on from the maybe-you-should-go-get-more dept.

New submitter Minion of Eris writes "It seems NASA can't keep track of its goodies. A recent audit discovered that moon rocks have been missing for 30 years, loaned displays have gone unreturned, and book-keeping has been generally poor. From the article: 'In a report issued by the agency's inspector general on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year. NASA, which has lent more than 26,000 samples, needs to keep better track of what is sent to researchers and museums, the report said. The lack of sufficient controls "increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost," the report concluded.'"

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprised by whatkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    A government agency and insufficient internal controls? I'm actually surprised that the audit didn't turn up missing spacecrafts.

  2. Cave Johnson by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Funny

    Nah, we learned that moon regolith is the perfect material for shooting a portal gun at. Quoth Cave Johnson:

    Welcome to the enrichment center. Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not. As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things left to wrap up though - first up, conversion gel. Now, the beancounters told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground them up, mixed them into a gel, and guess what: ground-up moon rocks are pure poison.

    Clearly that's where it all went.

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  3. Re:Very Rare Regolith Missing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why don't they just get ILM to make them some new ones?

  4. I wouldn't worry too much about it by warrax_666 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sure there are billions and billions of moon rocks out there.

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    HAND.