[meteorite-list] Moon Dust

From: Yinan Wang <veomega_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:27:30 -0500
Message-ID: <BANLkTi=x5+0K2fmh45Vt5j6RHca6Odn_ng_at_mail.gmail.com>

At least the NY Times dug a little further and contacted Slezak:

"The history of the tape and the dust was never much of a mystery,
though. Terry Slezak, who now lives in Boerne, Tex., was a
photographer in charge of processing the film brought back from the
moon landings. When he opened one of the canisters, dust spilled out
and coated his hands.

In a telephone interview Thursday, he said he remembered carefully
cleaning the film magazine with towels and tape to prevent the dust
from scratching the film. He then hung the tape in his darkroom.
Later, presented with a poster board of photographs signed by the
Apollo 11 astronauts, ?I added the little piece of Scotch tape with
the moon dust on it,? he said. ?I thought that would be kind of neat.?

Mr. Slezak said that no one from NASA or law enforcement had ever
questioned him about the tape, even when he sold the poster at an
auction in 2001.

A German collector of space memorabilia bought the poster ? including
the dusty tape, which was about an inch long and was subsequently cut
into smaller pieces and sold.

Mr. Slezak was a bit surprised to hear of the legal hubbub. ?I haven?t
seen or heard tell of this thing for a long time,? he said. "



-Yinan

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:04 PM, JoshuaTreeMuseum
<joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com> wrote:
> All the AP people, or whoever wrote the original article, ?had to do was add
> the simple caveat that all non-Antarctic lunar meteorites and meteoritical
> materials are perfectly legal to possess, buy and sell. A simple distinction
> between the legality of non-Antactic ?lunar meteorites and the illegality of
> NASA moon rocks would have done it. These people are, after all, journalism
> majors, unschooled in the esoteric, highly specialized ?field of
> meteoritics.
>
> Returning to the gist of the thread, it looks like the Feds and NASA are
> cracking down on the private possession of lunar dust retrieved from space
> paraphenalia. NASA workers regularly used strips of tape to clean ?lunar
> dust off space suits ?before they were returned to their manufacturer for
> inspection and repair.
>
> The Slezak lunar dust and other dust collected by Florian Noller from a moon
> bag carried on Apollo 16 has been in a gray area, apparently up until now.
> Unless the Feds are talking about some of the smuggled dust from the space
> suits. Sounds like they're talking about the Slezak dust which Noller ?has
> openly sold in the past. I think he was taken in for questioning and maybe
> charged but it came to nothing and he kept the dust. Looks ?like now they
> want all the dust for themselves.
>
> Phil Whitmer
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Received on Sat 25 Jun 2011 12:27:30 PM PDT