[GCA10]

My father was one of the scientific Principal Investigators (PIs) who analyzed the Apollo 11 lunar samples, back in 1969. Flipping through some of his notes from back then, it sounds as if a rotating assortment of bureaucrats injected themselves into the chain-of-custody with weird and embarrassing effects. To wit:

Some Agriculture Department folks decided that their legal authority to quarantine soil samples brought into the U.S. applied to lunar soils, too. They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples, exposed to "germ-free mice born by cesarean section." Only after the mice survived this ordeal was it safe to release the fuller batch of samples.

Another character insisted that the aluminum rock boxes be sealed, while on the moon, with gaskets of indium (soft, rare metal) which would deform to create a very tight seal. The geochemists on earth protested, in vain, that this procedure would ruin their hopes of doing any indium analysis of the samples themselves, shutting down an interesting line of research. No luck in changing the protocol. Turns out that the indium seals didn't work, and the rock boxes reached the earth-based quarantine facilities with normal air pressure anyway.

There's more silliness about trying to keep the lunar samples in a hard vacuum while designing rigidly mounted gloves that could be used to manipulate/slice/divide the samples without breaking the vacuum. Maybe we know today how to sustain flexible gloves in such an environment. We didn't, back then.

[dmix]

> They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples

There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.

[stinkbeetle]

Yep, government bureaucracy has always been horribly corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving, unfortunately.

[throw8449485]

Ok, just some facts:

- moon dust has very fine particles. It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.

- Electronics and dust do not mix well

- electrostatic properties were not known, it could stick to every surface and coat it, perhaps prevent vacuum seals etc... Look at images from inside capsule, before and after landing! And that was just dust, brought on suits, not full samples!

- it had horrible smell

[xtiansimon]

> “… moon dust has very fine particles…”

What’s more: “Unlike dust particles on Earth, dust on the Moon’s surface is sharp and abrasive – like tiny shards of glass – because it hasn’t been exposed to weathering and elements like water and oxygen.”

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-tec...

[pyuser583]

>It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.

and

> it had horrible smell

We shouldn't know what it smells like. That's forbidden knowledge, just like the taste of uranium.

[Pigo]

I never thought about the smell.

Does it smell strong because of it's composition or because the vacuum of space has a strange effect on it? Like the particulates not dispersing enough?

[garyrob]

I don't know. What if there happened to me some unimaginable pathogen that Earth animal life had no way of resisting, and that multiplied rapidly in the presence of our kind of life?

Extremely improbable. Astronomically improbable. Virtually impossible. All that is absolutely, 100% true.

But given the stakes, similarly astronomically high, I'm not sure it didn't actually make sense to do a quarantine for a few weeks. Yes, I know the indium seals didn't work. But the fact that we failed to create a quarantine doesn't mean it was worthless to at least make an attempt. It cost us virtually nothing in comparison to the stakes.

That's my personal response, anyway, and reflects the opinion I would have expressed at the time if I happened to have been involved in the project.

[jcynix]

Hmm, did they check whether their shoes where clean? Mine always have dirt underneath when I return from outside ;-0