The Misplaced Stuff: NASA loses moon, space rocks

SETH BORENSTEIN

AP Sci­ence Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Astro­nauts may have had the ‘right stuff’ to go to the moon, but when it comes to keep­ing track of what they brought back, NASA seems to have mis­placed some of the stuff.

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.

After last year’s case of a miss­ing moon sam­ple loaned to a Delaware astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­tory, which the astronomers there claimed they returned to NASA, the agency’s inspec­tor gen­eral decided to audit about one quar­ter of the thou­sands of sam­ples of moon rocks, lunar dust, mete­orites, and other space mate­r­ial that the agency loaned.

Of those cases, 19 per­cent of the researchers either could not account for the sam­ples or they had mate­r­ial that NASA records indi­cated had been destroyed or loaned to some­one else. That included 22 mete­orites and 2 comet sam­ples from a dar­ing mis­sion that grabbed comet chunks.

In two cases, one researcher still had nine lunar sam­ples he bor­rowed 35 years ago and another had 10 chunks of mete­orites he kept for 14 years. Nei­ther had ever worked on them. Another researcher had 36 moon sam­ples and kept them for 16 years after he had fin­ished his research.

The audit also unearthed records that listed hun­dreds of sam­ples that no longer existed.

In the Delaware case, NASA lent the Mount Cuba obser­va­tory a disk of moon rocks and moon dust in 1978 with the loan expir­ing in 2008. In 2010, NASA con­tacted the obser­va­tory and learned that its man­ager had died and the obser­va­tory couldn’t find the sam­ple, the inspec­tor general’s report said.

But that is not how the obser­va­tory sees it.

“We didn’t lose it,” said Uni­ver­sity of Delaware physics pro­fes­sor Harry Ship­man, a trustee of the obser­va­tory. Yes, the obser­va­tory man­ager died, but some­time in the 1990s “he returned it to NASA. We don’t know what NASA did with it,” he said.

NASA told the audi­tors that the obser­va­tory returned mete­orites, but not the lunar sam­ple and that still is miss­ing, said inspec­tor gen­eral spokes­woman Renee Juhans.

NASA spokesman Michael Cab­bage said the agency will con­tinue to lend out mate­r­ial to sci­en­tists and for edu­ca­tional dis­play but will adopt the spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tions the inspec­tor gen­eral made to improve its tracking.

“NASA does not con­sider these national trea­sure assets to be at high risk,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Dec 8 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.