(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
BY STEVEN SPARKMAN
ANCHOR LAUREN GORES
An audit by NASA’s inspector general shows more than 500 samples of space material have gone missing over the past 40 years.
Fox News lists some of the missing stuff.
“Meteorites from Mars, lunar soil samples, dust from comets and even ions from the outer layers of the sun! The report saying NASA needs to get a new tracking system -- you think? -- or consider doing inventory every year.”
The report followed a mixup between NASA and a Delaware observatory over a disk of lunar materials. The observatory’s 30-year loan expired in 2008. Two years later, NASA realized no one knew where the disk went.
“According to the report, Nasa contacted the observatory in 2010 to learn that its manager had died and the observatory couldn't find the sample. However according to the astronomers the samples had been returned to Nasa. … Nasa told the auditors that the observatory returned meteorites, but not the lunar sample...”
The report says NASA lost most of the 500 samples the same way: by loaning them to researchers and museums who just never returned them. A writer for Politico gives some examples.
“In one instance, the inspector general found a researcher with nine meteorites that the individual had said had been destroyed during his study. In another case, a researcher was still holding onto a moon rock he had borrowed 35 years earlier and never used for his work.”
NASA pointed out the lost materials amount to only 100th of 1% of what they’ve loaned out over the years. But the report also said as much as 19% of the materials on loan right now are unaccounted for, so the number of lost samples could be much higher.
USA Today reports the agency accepted the report and plans to make changes.
“The space agency concurred with all eight of the report's recommendations, such as requiring scholars to return unused moon rocks, and promised to have the new recommendations in place within nine months.”
Earlier this year, a moon rock from the Apollo missions which had been missing since the late ‘80s turned up in former president Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial papers.
