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A bag containing traces of moon dust is heading to auction — surrounded by some fallout from a galactic court battle.
Key points:
- The moon dust was collected on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969
- Bag was discovered in 2003 but misidentified and sold for $1,255 in a 2015 auction
- Last December NASA lost a court battle to seize the bag from its owner
The collection bag, used by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the Moon in 1969, will be featured on Thursday at a Sotheby's auction in New York City of items related to space voyages.
The pre-sale estimate is $2.52 million to $5.05 million.
The 30-by-20-centimetre bag from the Apollo 11 mission was misidentified and sold at an online government auction in 2015.
NASA fought to get it back.
In December, a federal judge ruled that it legally belonged to a Chicago-area woman who bought it at the auction for $1,255.
Sotheby's declined to identify the seller, however details of the 2015 purchase were made public during the court case.
Moon dust unwittingly found in thief's garage
Investigators unknowingly hit the motherlode in 2003 while searching the garage of a man later convicted of stealing and selling museum artefacts, including some that were on loan from NASA.
The bag auctioned in 2015 was among the items found in 2003.
Nancy Carlson, of Inverness, Illinois, got an ordinary-looking bag made of white Beta cloth and polyester with rubberised nylon and a brass zipper.
Ms Carlson, a collector, knew the bag had been used in a space flight, but did not know which one.
She sent it to NASA for testing, and the government agency, discovering its importance, fought to keep it.
The artefact "belongs to the American people," NASA said then.
US District Judge J Thomas Marten in Wichita, Kansas said that while it should not have gone up for auction, he did not have the authority to reverse the sale.
He ordered the government to return it.
The judge said the importance and desirability of the bag stemmed solely from the efforts of NASA employees whose "amazing technical achievements, skill and courage in landing astronauts on the moon and returning them safely have not been replicated in the almost half a century since the Apollo 11 landing".
AP
Topics: space-exploration, the-moon, moon-landing, science-and-technology, astronomy-space, spacecraft, offbeat, united-states, pacific