Remember how proud we all felt when we saved that very last piece of Halloween candy until, like, November 20th? The willpower? The fortitude? The satisfaction of waiting to open up something really exciting and fun and momentous?
Yeah NASA wins that particular horse race:
Like a time capsule that was sealed for posterity, one of the last unopened Apollo-era lunar samples collected during Apollo 17 has been opened under the careful direction of lunar sample processors and curators in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. This precious and well-preserved sample will serve as a narrow window into the permanent, geological record of Earth's closest celestial neighbor – the Moon.
Before NASA goes back for more samples – this time at the Moon's South Pole during the agency's upcoming Artemis missions – the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program, or ANGSA, is studying some of the last few lunar samples that NASA has kept unopened, in pristine condition, awaiting the day when scientists equipped with improved scientific and technologic methods could examine them.
Just to be clear, this stuff hasn't been waiting around in, like, a cardboard box or something; no, NASA takes its lunar samples much more seriously than that:
"We have had an opportunity to open up this incredibly precious sample that's been saved for 50 years under vacuum," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, "and we finally get to see what treasures are held within."
That day finally came for sample 73001, which was first vacuum sealed on the Moon and then stored in a second protective outer vacuum tube inside the nitrogen-purged processing cabinets in Johnson's lunar laboratory. Back in December 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt collected the lunar regolith by hammering thin, cylindrical sample-collection devices, or drive tubes, into a landslide deposit in the Moon's Taurus-Littrow Valley, capturing layers of ancient history for scientists to pore over.
Not the Bee has obtained exclusive footage of the exciting uncorking of this particular sample:
Nah not really that's just a shot of Han Solo being frozen in carbonite. We got nothing.
For real though this is very exciting and a great moment of history.
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