The New Yorker:

NASA’s lunar-sample curator gives a tour of the vault where the agency will house the material it brings back from its manned moon mission in 2026.

By Matthew Hutson

Earlier this year, an American-built spacecraft, Odysseus, landed on the moon for the first time in fifty-two years. The craft was launched in advance of Artemis III, a nasa effort to send a human mission to the moon, in 2026, in part to collect samples of soil from the lunar south pole. Rocks and regolith from that mission will join the three hundred and eighty-two kilograms of material collected by the Apollo astronauts, which is housed mostly at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston.

Recently, Ryan Zeigler, nasa’s lunar-sample curator, gave a private tour of the collection to a visitor. Zeigler had a bushy beard and wore a T-shirt with the nasa “meatball” logo, but with “shiny” in place of “nasa”—a meme from the sci-fi show “Firefly.” He has been working with lunar samples since he started graduate school, in 1998; he used to take trips to Antarctica to collect meteorites.

Zeigler and the visitor put on white protective “bunny suits” and stepped through a series of sealed doors, including two that enclosed an air shower. Zeigler explained that, in 1969, every sample collected by the Apollo 11 team, along with the astronauts themselves, went next door to a different building with a negatively pressurized lab. “Anything that might have been contaminated by space bugs from the moon, they put it in quarantine over there, to make sure it didn’t, you know, accidentally kill all life on Earth,” he said. The scientists were being safe, but they’d suspected that the moon couldn’t support life.

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