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Volume 71 – February 2012

Curator's Comments


Gary Lofgren, Lunar Sample Curator at JSC

Gary Lofgren

Lunar Sample Curator
NASA JSC

Many years have passed since the last publication of the Lunar News and many changes have taken place in ARES and here at JSC. See the related article by Carlton Allen in this issue about the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation at JSC.

Again Lunar samples made the news in a way we all probably hoped it wouldn’t happen. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report of missing and stolen lunar samples fueled a flurry of speculation. The report stated that JSC’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office, which maintain NASA’s collection of 163,000 Astromaterials samples, lacked sufficient control over its loans of Moon rocks and other items for research, education and public display.

Although such losses at any time are regrettable, NASA agrees with the OIG. Report that continuing to improve accounting procedures could reduce losses. The benefits to science of making these samples available for study, however, vastly outweighed the tiny risk of loss, NASA spokesman William P. Jeffs, said in a statement. NASA officials said they were implementing the recommendations in the report, which called for the space agency to require loan agreements for all types of materials and strengthen the inventory verification process, among other steps. Mr. Jeffs said that although several researchers involved in losing samples were reprimanded by NASA, their research privileges were not revoked. (JSC Media Services)

The truth is that the losses reported by the inspector general represent only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of Astromaterials samples that were allocated to scientists around the world for more than 40 years. In particular, the lost samples from the Moon amounted to less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the samples that were safely returned in the past four decades. One significant result of the OIG audit will be the request of all Lunar PIs that they return lunar samples that are not the subject of current or planned research. We will be contacting PIs this year to facilitate the return of these lunar samples. We do have newly revised procedures for sample accounting that are detailed elsewhere in this newsletter.

The samples that American and foreign dignitaries received as gifts were not included in the report, because the space agency does not track them. Moon-rock experts say NASA should keep an inventory of those as well, and they estimate that of nearly 400 Moon rocks given to state and world leaders after the Apollo 11 and 17 missions, almost 200 have been lost, destroyed or stolen. Joseph R. Gutheinz Jr., a Texas lawyer and former OIG agent has been credited, along with his students for locating many lost or misplaced lunar sample gifts to states and countries. See related article in this issue about the ‘Children of the World’ rock.