What a spring clean. Vials of moon dust collected by the first men to walk on the moon have been discovered in a storage closet in California after being missing for more than 40 years. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, NASA sent 68 grams of lunar dust to Melvin Calvin at the University of California, Berkeley, who won the 1961 Nobel prize for chemistry. Calvin split the sample between his colleagues to study its carbon compounds, then gathered it up to send back to NASA. But only 50 grams were returned. The remainder was assumed destroyed in the process of research.
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