Moon rocks

Ryan Zeigler smiled broadly, his round face accentuated by a clean room cap covering his head, as he stood in front of a shiny, multi-ton bank vault door. “Well guys, I saved the best for last,” he said. Zeigler studies lunar rocks at Johnson Space Center with the aim of better understanding how the Moon formed. He’s also a curator of the Apollo samples, and he’d arranged for our tour of all the astromaterials labs at NASA.

Now we stood outside the vault where more than two-thirds of all the Moon rocks in the world were stored.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Then we entered. Built from 1977 to 1979, the facility houses collections from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17, which are stored in separate stainless steel cabinets. Astronauts brought a total of 2,200 samples back during the six Apollo missions. And while about 85 percent of the collection remains in pristine condition, there are now more than 100,000 lunar rock samples to track. “NASA’s inspector general could show up at any time and ask to see a particular sample, and we have to be able to find it,” Zeigler explained.

It felt a bit alien in that room. The rocks themselves weren’t visible; they were carefully packed away, inside metal containers and teflon bags, triple-sealed inside the cabinets, which themselves are filled with pure nitrogen. “A huge amount of effort goes into keeping these lunar samples safe for future generations,” Zeigler said. But even out of sight, one could feel the tons of rocks. They had all once sat on the Moon’s surface for billions of years, then had been picked up by one of a dozen humans' hands, blasted off the lunar surface, and then splashed down into the Pacific Ocean. And now they all rested, silently, in this room. Alien, indeed.

Despite the precautions, however, the “opened” samples cannot be preserved indefinitely. Even inside their triple-sealed containers, the ultrapure nitrogen contains 10 to 100 parts-per-billion of water. The Moon rocks don’t show signs of rusting, but perhaps the outer nanometer or two of each one has been contaminated. Zeigler led us over to one cabinet. “These have never been opened,” he said. “These are three of our seven unopened samples.” They were collected in the vacuum of the lunar surface, placed inside vacuum sealed tubes, and remain that way to this day. NASA is preserving them for some theoretical future where science has progressed to enable some new, powerful method of analysis.

About 70 percent of all the Moon rocks are stored in this one room. Roughly five percent have been destroyed during various research processes, and about 15 percent are kept in a backup vault at White Sands in New Mexico. Sure, Johnson Space Center is secure, and this facility is on the second floor. But the space center is just across the street from Clear Lake, which drains into Galveston Bay, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s conceivable a Category 5 hurricane could destroy this facility.

Zeigler walks us out of the vault and into a similarly sized work room where the rest of the Moon rocks are. Here there are great chunks of the Moon displayed in more stainless steel cabinets. This is where return samples are processed—the lab still hands out 500 to 1,000 lunar samples a year to scientists for study—before going back into the vault. It’s also where VIPs are brought to be shown Moon rocks.

Among the samples on display is the so-called “Genesis rock,” which appears to have been coated by powdered sugar. The crew of Apollo 15 had been tasked with searching for just such an anorthosite rock, and they found it near the Apennine Mountains. Dating to 4.1 billion years old, within a few hundred million years of the Solar System’s formation, the Genesis rock helped validate the theory that the Moon formed after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth in the very early Solar System.

There was simply nowhere to go from there. Our day in these fascinating labs at the space center was over. No, we didn’t get to hold a Moon rock. When Buzz Aldrin visited this lab, he threw a bit of a fit when told even he couldn’t hold a rock he collected on the Moon's surface. Eventually Aldrin got his way, but we aren’t, alas, Apollo astronauts. As for a sample to take home, that’s an honor accorded only to sovereign countries. Ars will have to get to work on that.