



Video: Moon rock

Enter our competition and you could win this piece of moon rock The Dhofar region of Southern Oman, on the eastern border of Yemen, where the moon rock was found (Image: Mike Kramer / freelargephotos.com)

Due to the unprecedented interest in this competition, we have had to close entries on this page. You can still enter by leaving a comment here.


WOULD you like to own this little piece of the moon?

Depending on which time zone you happen to be in, 20 or 21 July 2009 sees the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Our competition to celebrate that historic event offers a rare and fabulous prize for the winner: a scrap of genuine moon rock.

The competition is simple to enter. You will doubtless know the words relayed from Neil Armstrong when he stepped off Apollo 11’s lunar module and onto the moon itself: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Can you think of something better for him to have said – something even more memorable, or perhaps something funnier?

How to enter

Your entry should be no more than 75 characters long (including spaces).

Use the comment form at the foot of this article to submit your answer.

Please start a new thread, rather than replying to an existing comment.

Please remember to include a working email address (in the correct box in the form, not in the comment itself) so we can reach you if you are our winner. It won’t be used for any purpose other than the competition.

The winning entry will be chosen from entries received by 5pm GMT on 29 June.

It will be published in the 18 July issue of New Scientist, along with the best runners up.

The editor’s decision is final.

Please read the Terms and Conditions before entering

The prize

The piece of moon rock is part of a lunar meteorite found by French collector Luc Labenne, in the Dhofar region of Southern Oman, on the eastern border of Yemen.

“It’s not a too tiny piece, and the end cut is the favourite part of the collectors when they can afford it,” said Labenne. “So you have the cut part, which is flat, and the opposite part, which is the natural exposed part of the lunar meteorite during the entry to our atmosphere.”

Our little piece of rock weighs almost 1.4 grams. Typically, they are worth around $1000 per gram.

The piece has been authenticated as a lunar meteorite by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. But before handing it over, we wanted to find out first-hand just how tricky it can be to distinguish a fragment of moon rock from a common-or-garden meteorite.

So we handed it over to Colin Pillinger at the Open University, in the UK, who worked on the original Apollo 11 moon samples.

“It is more difficult to tell a lunar rock from a terrestrial one than any other,” said Pillinger. “They are more valuable to collectors, even than Mars meteorites, but they are harder to be sure about.”

With the help of Richard Greenwood, Andy Tindle, Ian Franchi, Michelle Higgins and Diane Johnson, it was subjected to a battery of tests.

Alas, it fractured into two pieces in the process, which is described in detail in Moon rocks and how to spot them. But we are now confident that our moon rock is genuine.

We will present the moon rock to the winner in an engraved Perspex mounting: the ultimate prize to mark the anniversary of the great Apollo 11 adventure.

Due to the unprecedented interest in this competition, we have had to close entries on this page. You can still enter by leaving a comment here.