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NASA Missing Hundreds of Moon Rocks
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.'"
Yeah so these things are worth millions of dollars (to collectors and researchers alike) and you call them "missing"? Perhaps 'stolen' would be a better word considering the worth of these rocks. Also, I can't believe that the story of the Texan intern who stole and sold lunar samples from NASA and then had sex on top of them with his girlfriend so that they were the first people to have sex on the moon was left out of this article.
I'm guessing they're not missing but rather have long been stolen and sold on the black market.
My work here is dung.
I think it's more of the lack of a sufficient space program that'll lose us "unique resources."
Go get more. The reason nobody was paying much attention in the 1960's is that they never expected the supply of moon rocks would dwindle. We need to maintain permanent residence whatever we go. We went to the moon, we need to establish a base there. If we go to mars, we need to establish a permanent base there too. If we don't force ourselves down this path, we're never going to get off this rock.
is it?
Back in the 1960's they had to start with a clean board and design the technology in less than a DECADE to fulfill the promise made by a dead president.
Now we have the knowhow, we have the technology, what's the single insurmountable obstacle to returning to our nearest solar neighbour?
Politics.
It's not even as if the technology has been locked away and forgotten, either. NASA's new launch vehicles will have first stage boosters based on the J2 engines. The manned capsules will be based on the Gemini and Apollo capsules. The Mercury-Atlas and Gemini booster stages are still in use for heavy lifting high-risk and military payloads. It just seems a sad waste to me, that such high adventure was shitcanned so fast after all those "firsts" - landing on the Moon, walking on the Moon, driving on the Moon, playing golf on the Moon. Was all that really done just to piss off the Russians? I have a difficult time putting it down to merely that. Our destiny is in space. We shouldn't let petty disagreements over distribution of finite resources stand in the way of that, or we as a species will die in our crib.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
just as long as the government has a slightly better handle on where all the plutonium is (contemporaneous cold war artifact)
i'm not too concered about escape dusty basalt
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A government agency and insufficient internal controls? I'm actually surprised that the audit didn't turn up missing spacecrafts.
Um... why would they report the number as "500" and include 218 samples that were "returned". Wouldn't those, by definition, no longer be "lost"?
Thats nearly half.... so only 282 missing,
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nah, we learned that moon regolith is the perfect material for shooting a portal gun at. Quoth Cave Johnson:
Clearly that's where it all went.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I've worked for companies that, for book keeping reasons, would not let you as an employee take a single thing for personal possession. However, if an item was old and no longer usable, management would "turn a blind eye" if you walked out the door with it. Honestly, if it was large enough, they would help you usher it out the door.
I know moon rocks aren't the same but I wonder how many items were "lost" to the hands of astronauts and key mission controllers because they frickin' changed the world in being part of the process and NASA felt they deserved a small chunk of history.
I'm not saying it's right, but I also wouldn't want to prosecution Neil Armstrong if he left his office on his last day with a palm sized moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission, tucked away in a coffee mug.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. We *can* get more.
So, out of eight hundred kilos of moon rocks, some beancounter at NASA is having apoplexy about a half-kilo of rocks not having proper paperwork to document where they have gone?
He's right. These samples are unique. As long as the bureaucrats rule, NASA doesn't have a chance in Hell of going back and collecting another 800 kilos of rocks. This guy knows that these samples are irreplacible becasue he knows that NASA will never be able to do what they did back when engineers called most of the shots.
Let him rant. Just like rare earth metals, in a few years we will be able to buy all the moon rocks we want, from the Chinese.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
...where they came from
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm sure there are billions and billions of moon rocks out there.
HAND.
I did an internship with a space industry contractor in the summer of 2005 and worked alongside their DBAs, mostly working on the database that was being used for inventory management. Partway through the summer, the lab in charge of the lunar material contacted the group I was working with regarding an update to their database. They wanted to migrate everything they had from the, I believe, late '70s DEC machines that they were still running with a hierarchal database system I had never heard of (I recall seeing some output that looked vaguely COBOL-like) to MS SQL Server 2000. There had been a failed attempt to migrate to FoxPro sometime in the early '90s, from what I heard, but they had scrapped it and just stayed with what they had in the end. At the time they were calling us, they were worried that something might fail and that they'd lose it all.
In order to better understand their organizational system, we got to don bunny suits and head into the vault where all of the samples are kept at Johnson Space Center. It was pretty fun getting a chance to go around, peek into cabinets, and just see how it was all stored in perfect condition. Since the samples they loan out to scientists need to have their origins tracked and new samples are created by breaking old ones, the samples are labeled with an increasingly long identifier as they are broken down. To give a quick (and slightly oversimplified) example, an initial sample brought back from the moon may have been labeled A. After it was broken in two, the two samples were A-1 and A-2. When the first one was broken in three, it became A-1-a, A-1-b, and A-1-c. Each of those is referred to as a sample, even though they may have originated from a single sample, and since samples can be created outside of the immediate vicinity of NASA's personnel, it's not really surprising that some samples have gone missing. Hell, NASA requires that every speck of dust be returned as a sample as well.
At the time, I think they had said that roughly 90 or 95% of the samples brought back are still in pristine, untouched condition, and are being preserved in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere to prevent oxidation. So even with all of these samples lost, the vast majority of it still exists and has yet to be studied by anyone.
Also, I didn't realize it, but NASA has all of the samples that the Soviets brought back from the moon with their unmanned lunar missions. Those are kept in one part of the vault, separate from the ones retrived by the American missions. Neat little fact that I didn't know at the time that I went into the vault.
People talk about NASA in the time of the Apollo program as a well oiled machine that could do no wrong. Well, here's evidence that it was a bureaucratic disaster. It's easy to look back with rose colored glasses and say the shuttle era was a mess, but in reality maybe it was always that way?
Bureaucracies are always a mess. Strip the facade behind any complicated human activity and you will find confusion, graft, incompetence and sloth. NASA has 'lost' lots of things - Apollo tapes, pieces parts, data. They've made grevious engineering errors (ie, Apollo 1).
Archival processes are very expensive and when you are more focused about doing things than preserving what you did, it isn't surprising that you can't account for everything.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No, back in the day it was exactly the opposite. Everyone was totally focused on one goal -- getting to the Moon by 31 December 1969. Since neither the task at hand nor the time to complete it were changing, plenty of people were hired and plenty of money was spent, to be sure, but that situation also meant that any bureaucratic baloney was ignored, sidestepped, or waived. People's reputations were on the line, and nobody wanted to be part of the group/division/company/organization that kept the country from reaching the moon first. Whoever was deemed responsible for that could look forward to a lifetime of testimony before congressional investigative committees, not to mention the nation on a never-ending series of Walter Cronkite prime time Special Reports.
Not to mention not being able to get another job in your profession for the rest of your life. Being Steve Bartman would be a step up.
After 1973, however, NASA was a different entity. When a pie is growing, as NASA was in the 1960s, nobody bothers to erect any bureaucratic fences, since there's plenty of work for everyone. When the pie shrinks, however, people start trying to stake out their remaining territory, and the end is near.
I suggest NASA be immediately punished by being made to go back on the moon and get enough rocks to replace the ones they lost.
I'm just hoping they won't end in a litterbox.
How much more research could you possibly do beyond "Yup, it's a rock."?
Surface structure, chemical composition, searching for embedded items (micrometeorites?), trying to make some sort of concrete out of it to build a moon base from, helping to determine age / history of that moon area, etc, etc, etc.
For some research a surrogate might do, but then you'd still have to compare with the real thing once in a while. Since we have so little actual moon material, of course that is worth its weight in gold (well no, much more actually since only way to obtain more is to go back to the moon - pretty expensive undertaking).
Everything you've listed either has been done with other samples, wouldn't be useful, or would result in the destruction of the sample.
So if some scientist had one sitting on his desk for ages and did nothing with it, I'd say he made the right choice. It's most valuable uses are as a paperweight or as a conversation starter with dumb chicks you want to bang.