14 DAY TRIAL // Snooping around in a warehouse can be a rather rewarding experience, an archivist working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory might say following her stumbling upon several vials of moon dust hidden inside one such storage facility in California.
Information shared with the public says that the moon dust inside these vials was collected by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Each of the vials sport a label which has the date of 24 July 1970 written on it, hence the conclusion that they date back to 43 years ago.
The archivist who found them explained that, when she first spotted them, the moon dust vials were carefully tucked away inside a vacuum sealed glass jar.
“They were vacuum sealed in a glass jar. We don’t know how or when they ended up in storage,” archivist Karen Nelson said.
According to Space, the vials were not alone, but accompanied by a copy of a 1971 research titled “Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples,” which was placed right next to the jar in which the moon dust was kept.
Specialists suspect that the vials of moon dust ended up in this warehouse because of some wacky mistake.
Thus, they say that, all things considered, the samples should have been returned to NASA after researchers working with Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory had finished carrying out several tests on them.
However, it is quite obvious that the vials never made it to NASA's headquarters.
“After experiments were conducted and papers published, those samples should have been sent back to NASA. Instead they wound up in storage, where they sat collecting dust until they were discovered more than four decades later,” reads a statement issued by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
By the looks of it, NASA scientists are well aware of the vials' having been discovered, and are now waiting to finally get their hands on them.