Extensive efforts are made to keep the lunar sample collection physically secure and environmentally uncontaminated. Jim Townsend directs our work to maintain the lunar sample building, and all of its clean rooms, as well as our liquid nitrogen tank farm (which supplies the high-purity nitrogen gas that protects the samples from Earth's atmosphere) and in-house, precision cleaning laboratories. Each tool and container is meticulously cleaned before it touches a lunar sample. Jim works closely with Ed Cornitius who supervises the technical team consisting of Jack Warren (clean room certification and trouble-shooting), Ron Bastien (electronic systems construction and maintenance), Terry Parker and Bill Williams (precision cleaning), and Rita Sosa (clean room housekeeping). The same team helps maintain our remote storage vault at Brooks Air Force Base. The technical operations team has nearly completed construction of a new freon-free precision cleaning system that will carry us forward into the next decades of lunar sample curation.

Equally arduous efforts are made to keep the genealogy of each lunar sample clearly recorded and updated, for the benefit of science, and to maintain a record of current locations for every lunar sample that is in NASA custody or that has been placed on loan to the world outside the lunar sample facility. In addition, continuous improvements are sought for our on-line electronic data bases that we make available to the public. Dale Browne leads our data group that includes Claire Dardano (computer system manager), Sue Goudie and Alene Simmons (sample shipping/receiving and file maintenance), and Judy Allton (document archivist). The data team is currently establishing a new workstation that will be used to electronicize, onto optical disks, the voluminous sample-processing notes and photographs that we, and our predecessors, have accumulated since 1969.

As with the lunar sample caretakers introduced previously, our operations and data team members view their work not merely as a job but as a career. As they celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, these teams believe that their work not only touches the past but also the future.