There are many unanswered questions in the universe. What is the reason that anything exists? How much does it cost to have moon dust eaten by a bug?
The last mystery was close to being solved this month. Lawyers for NASA got involved.
The moon dust and three insects were put up for auction in 1969 as part of an experiment to observe the effects of lunar material.
Bobby Livingston, an executive vice president at RR Auction, said that the bidding for the auction had reached $40,000.
The price was expected to go much higher at a live auction on Thursday at a hotel in Cambridge, Mass., but company officials canceled it after NASA claimed the experiment was theirs.
In a letter dated June 15, the agency said that no person, university or other entity has ever been given permission to keep samples from the Apollo mission. The auction house was asked to identify the property owner.
What could the $24 billion annual budget of the space agency want with a few dead insects, the contents of their guts and a few specks of moon material? An audit from the agency's inspector general offers some insight, but a spokeswoman for NASA wouldn't comment.
The audit said that the agency has lost a lot of property because of its lack of procedures. NASA's reluctance to assert ownership and inadequate records management made it hard for the agency to recover property.
NASA lost a bag that was used to collect lunar rocks because of its poor record-keeping, according to an audit. The bag sold for over $1 million at the auction. A prototype of a lunar roving vehicle was spotted a few years ago. The scrap yard owner sold it at an auction.
"NASA has a long history of not keeping proper track and control over its historic space items."
It wasn't a surprise that NASA contacted us. They aren't consistent. We don't know which item will make a noise and which one won't.
On July 20, 1969 two members of the Apollo 11 crew walked on the moon. They brought 47 pounds of lunar material back to Earth.
NASA was worried about the moon soil's toxicity. The journal Science reported in 1970 that it fed the material to 10 lower animals and enlisted researchers from across the country to assess the effects.
A few german roaches that had been fed the lunar diet ended up in the laboratory of an entomologist. According to an article in The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, there was no evidence that the moon dust was harmful to the roaches.
The professor kept the roaches and the contents of their stomachs at her house until she died in 2007.
Her daughter sold the material. She said in an interview on Friday that it was not close to $40,000. The person who bought the materials from her may or may not be the same person who put the items up for sale. The seller's name is not being made public.
The company pulled the auction due to NASA's concerns. He said that he wanted the owner and the space agency to figure it out.
The government has a problem with legal provenance in this case because they can't produce any of the documentation governing the transaction of providing the roaches to the doctor and University of Minnesota
The moon material was destroyed when NASA fed it to the roaches. He said that the moon dust was provided to the doctor.
A spokeswoman for the University of Minnesota didn't reply to an email. Ms.Brooks tried to find a contract for the experiment but couldn't.
The files from the experiment were in a fireproof safe that she opened. There was a plaque that NASA gave her mother, several newspaper clippings about the experiment, and a NASA pay stub that belonged to her mother.
She said that she had no regrets about the amount of money she got for the experiment. At the time, she thought it was a good deal. She stated that they were just roaches.
Delaquérire was a researcher.
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