Im not allowed to touch the moon rocks.<\/p>\n
In the room where NASA stores the samples that Apollo astronauts brought to Earth decades ago, I peer at rocks and trays of dirt through glass. But my tour guides are firm: Nobody touches the moon rocks.<\/p>\n
This is the pristine sample lab at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. Being here is a big deal for me. Ive spent years looking at cosmic rocks from a distance \u2014 my childhood involved lots of stargazing through a telescope, and in my college lab job, I processed pictures of Mars. Ive been itching to scoop up a handful of alien sand and let it run through my fingers. Today, the opportunity feels as close as it is unlikely.<\/p>\n
Before entering this clean room, I remove all my jewelry, including my wedding ring. My guides and I cover our shoes with blue paper booties and step into full-body jumpsuits with zippers from navel to neck and snaps at the ankles, wrists and throat. Once in the white bunny suits, we put on neoprene gloves, a hair cover, plus a pair of knee-high boots pulled over the blue booties. Finally, we spend a full minute standing in a phone booth\u2013sized air shower, under a steady breeze blowing from ceiling to floor to clear us of any lingering dust.<\/p>\n
This story is part of a special report celebrating humans enduring fascination with the moon and exploring the many ways it affects life on Earth. More articles will be published in the coming weeks. See all the articles, plus our 1969 coverage of Apollo 11, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Inside the clean room, I face another barrier: The rocks are stored in secure, pressurized cabinets \u2014 like big terrariums \u2014 filled with pure nitrogen. The only way to reach the samples is by sticking already-gloved hands into another set of gloves that wave from the cabinets like zombie arms.<\/p>\n Only five people in the world get to routinely handle these precious pebbles, sample processor Charis Krysher tells me. Shes one of them. But even Krysher and the lucky few cant touch the samples directly. To pick up an Apollo rock, Krysher must either use stainless steel tweezers or slide her fingers into a third set of gloves made of Teflon.<\/p>\n \u201cYou do lose quite a bit of dexterity,\u201d she says. \u201cYou get used to it, but it takes practice.\u201d<\/p>\n All this effort is to protect the 382 kilograms of rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust lifted from the moon during the six Apollo landings from 1969 through 1972. Those priceless samples are still offering fresh details about how the moon \u2014 and the entire solar system \u2014 formed and evolved. The rocks have revealed the rough ages of all the rocky planets surfaces and informed debate about whether an ancient reshuffling of the outer planets caused a bombardment of meteorites<\/a> on Earth (SN Online: 9\/12\/16<\/em>).<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the biggest misconceptions is that the Apollo samples arent being studied anymore, and that the Apollo samples only tell us about the moon,\u201d says Ryan Zeigler, Apollo sample curator at the Johnson Space Center. \u201cNeither of those is true.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, NASA is opening a cache of untouched samples for new studies on this 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.<\/p>\n\n\n
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