Where have the moonstones gone?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 2012, the US space agency NASA announced that most of the moon rocks that the Apollo 17 crew brought to Earth … were gone. When the astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission brought samples of lunar rock to their home planet, US President Richard Nixon sent pieces of moonstone to representatives of 135 states.

In total, the United States sent out over 270 lunar rock fragments. Of these, 160 stones simply disappeared.

Most likely, the moonstones were stolen and gone to private collections. One day, a moonstone appeared on the black market, which Nixon sent to the government of Honduras. It weighed just over a pound and sold for $ 5 million.

Of all the moonstones ever sold at auction, only pieces of rock brought to Earth by Soviet cosmonauts were legal. When, in 1993, the Russian government sold moonstones from the Luna 16 project at Sotheby's, one of the lucky ones who wished to remain anonymous bought 0.2 grams of moon dust for $ 443,000.

Let's recall the details of this story with lunar soil:

It is believed that the Americans brought 378 kg of lunar soil and rocks from the moon. Anyway, NASA says so. This is almost four centners. It is clear that only astronauts could deliver such an amount of soil: no space stations can do this.

True, some particularly corrosive researchers carried out counting according to the relevant publications of scientific centers and could not find convincing evidence that these 45 kg reached the laboratories of even Western scientists. Moreover, according to them, it turns out that at present in the world no more than 100 g of American lunar soil wanders from laboratory to laboratory, so that usually the researcher received half a gram of rock.

That is, NASA treats the lunar soil like a stingy knight to gold: it keeps the treasured centners in its basements in securely locked chests, giving out only pitiful grams to the researchers. The USSR did not escape this fate either.

In our country at that time the leading scientific organization for all studies of the lunar soil was the Institute of Geochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now - GEOKHI RAS). The head of the meteoritics department of this institute, Dr. M. A. Nazarov reports: “The Americans transferred 29.4 grams (!) Of lunar regolith (in other words, lunar dust) to the USSR from all Apollo expeditions, and from our collection of Luna-16, 20 and 24 samples were issued abroad 30, 2 g . In fact, the Americans exchanged lunar dust with us, which can be delivered by any automatic station, although the astronauts should have brought weighty boulders, and it is most interesting to look at them.

What is NASA going to do with the rest of the lunar "good"? Oh, this is a "song."

"In the United States, it was decided to keep the bulk of the delivered samples intact until new, more advanced ways of studying them are developed," write competent Soviet authors, from whose pen more than one book on lunar soil came out.

“It is necessary to spend the minimum amount of material, leaving untouched and uncontaminated most of each individual sample for study by future generations of scientists,” - explains the position of NASA American expert J. A. Wood.

Obviously, the American specialist believes that no one will fly to the moon and never - neither now nor in the future. And therefore it is necessary to protect the centners of the lunar soil more than an eye. At the same time, modern scientists are humiliated: with their devices they can examine every single atom in a substance, but they are denied confidence - they have not matured. Or they didn’t come out with a snout. NASA’s persistent concern for future scientists is more like it’s a convenient excuse to hide the disappointing fact: there are no moon rocks or quintals of lunar soil in its storerooms.

Another oddity: after the completion of the "lunar" flights, NASA suddenly began to experience an acute shortage of money for their research. As of 1974, one of the American researchers writes: “A significant part of the samples will be stored as a reserve at the space flight center in Houston. The cut in funding will reduce the number of researchers and slow down the pace of research."

July 1971 In good faith, the USSR unilaterally transfers to the USA 3 g of soil from Luna-16, but does not receive anything from the USA, although the exchange agreement was signed six months ago, and NASA allegedly already contains 96 kg of lunar soil (from "Apollo 11", "Apollo 12" and "Apollo 14"). Another 9 months pass.

April 1972 NASA finally hands over a lunar soil sample. It was allegedly delivered by the crew of the American Apollo 15 spacecraft, although 8 months have passed since the Apollo 15 flight (July 1971). By this time, NASA allegedly already contained 173 kg of moon rocks (from Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15).

Soviet scientists receive from these riches a certain sample, the parameters of which are not reported in the newspaper Pravda. But thanks to Dr. M. A. We know to Nazarov that this sample consisted of regolith and did not exceed 29 g in mass.

It is very likely that the United States had no real lunar soil at all until about July 1972. Apparently, somewhere in the first half of 1972, the Americans had the first grams of real lunar soil, which was automatically delivered from the Moon. It was only then that NASA showed its readiness to make the exchange.

And in recent years, the Americans' lunar soil (more precisely, what they claim to be lunar soil) has begun to disappear altogether. In the summer of 2002, a huge number of samples of lunar material - a safe weighing almost 3 quintals - disappeared from the storerooms of the NASA Museum of the American Space Center. Johnson in Houston. Have you ever tried to steal a 300 kg safe from the territory of the space center? And don't try: it's too hard and dangerous work. But the thieves, on whose trail the police came out wonderfully quickly, did it easily. Tiffany Fowler and Ted Roberts, who worked in the building at the time of the disappearance, were arrested by special agents of the FBI and NASA in a restaurant in Florida. Subsequently, in Houston, the third partner, Shae Saur, was taken into custody, and then the fourth participant in the crime, Gordon McVater, who helped transport the stolen goods. The thieves intended to sell invaluable evidence of NASA's lunar mission at a price of $ 1000-5000 per gram through the site of the mineralogical club in Antwerp (Holland). The cost of the stolen goods, according to information from overseas, was more than $ 1 million.

A few years later, another misfortune. In the US, in the Virginia Beach area, unknown attackers stole two small sealed plastic boxes in the form of a disk with samples of meteorite and lunar matter from a car, judging by the markings on them. Samples of this kind, according to Space, are being handed over by NASA to special instructors "for training purposes." Before receiving such samples, teachers undergo special instructions, during which they are trained to properly handle this US national treasure. And the "national treasure", it turns out, is so easy to steal … Although it does not look like a theft, but a staged theft in order to get rid of evidence: there is no soil - there are no "inconvenient" questions.

Recently, the US space agency NASA announced that about half of the lunar rock samples brought to Earth by two expeditions in the 1970s were missing. They were presented to the leaders of different countries of the world. What is their fate?

Near the end of the Apollo 17 mission on December 13, 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, the last humans to land on the moon, recovered the moonstone. “We would like to share this sample with all countries of the world,” Cernan said at the time. His wish was fully fulfilled.

President Richard Nixon ordered the brick-sized sample to be divided into separate pieces and sent to 135 heads of state and governors of 50 US states.

Each such "moonstone of goodwill" was enclosed in a glass ball and installed on a wooden base with the image of the flag of a particular country.

A total of 350 samples were sent out in this way. 270 of them were sent to different countries of the world, and 100 - to the governors of the American states.

But 184 of them disappeared - they were either stolen, or nothing is known about them at all.

Some of the moonstones the Americans brought to Earth were stolen by thieves. Others, such as the moonstone sent to the Romanian dictator Ceausescu, ended up in the hands of corrupt officials. Some stones were destroyed due to negligence. So, the moonstone sent by the Americans to Ireland was lost as a result of a fire. He, along with the burnt remains of one of the Dublin observatories, was taken to a landfill.

“Two samples were sent to the Gaddafi government in Libya - they disappeared without a trace. Romania is also unable to find the moonstone given to it,”says Joseph Guteinz, a Texas lawyer and former NASA official who took on the task of locating the missing samples.

In 1998, he led NASA's Operation Lunar Eclipse to find out the fate of the missing samples.

He ran an ad in the US Today newspaper offering to purchase lunar rock samples.

The first seller from Honduras approached him, who offered to buy a stone weighing 1, 142 g from him for 5 million dollars.

According to Guteinets, NASA and the countries that received the gifts were careless about their registration systems.

The only legally formalized act of selling lunar rocks was the Sotheby’s auction in New York in 1993, when a sample of lunar dust delivered by the Soviet Luna 16 probe was sold for $ 442.5 thousand.

Joseph Guteinz began searching for missing moonstones many years ago

According to Guteinets, he was approached several times by private individuals wishing to sell samples of lunar rocks - for example, a woman from California, as well as sellers from Spain and Cyprus.

Some of the lunar gifts were lost during revolutions or political conflicts. This happened with a stone presented to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The lunar rock sample was probably sold after his execution.

There are other examples - in Ireland, after a fire in a Dublin museum, such a moonstone was taken to a landfill along with the debris in a former quarry - it probably still lies there, despite the fact that its value on the black market exceeds 3 million dollars.

Due to the complexity and volume of the task of finding all the stones, Guteinz turned to students at the University of Arizona, where he teaches forensics, for help.

So far, they have traced the fate of 77 samples, although Guteinz admits that most of them will never be returned to their homeland.

And here, back in 2009, such news began to crawl out. According to the Associated Press, the Dutch experts analyzed the "moonstone" - an item, officially, through the Department of State, donated to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands Willem Dries by the then US Ambassador to the Netherlands William Middendorf during a "goodwill" visit to the country of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin after completing the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

The date of delivery of the precious gift is known - October 9, 1969. After the death of Mr. Driz, the most valuable relic, insured for $ 500 thousand, became an exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

And only now studies of the "moonstone" have shown that the gift of the United States, officially exhibited next to Rembrandt's canvases, turned out to be a simple fake - a piece of petrified wood.

Rijksmuseum employees plan to keep it in the museum further - however, of course, in a different capacity.

"This is a funny story, with a number of still unclear points," - the official press secretary of the museum Xandra van Gelder shared her impressions with the AP correspondents.

The still alive William Middendorf, apparently, became an unwitting accomplice of the embarrassment - the most precious relic, symbolizing both the technological power of the United States and the openness of its space program, was presented to him by the US Department of State.

The stone aroused suspicions back in 2006 - experts doubted that the Americans would transfer with such difficulty a copy of the lunar soil just three months after the Apollo 11 landing. The staff of the local university at a cursory glance estimated that this stone has hardly ever been on the moon.