[meteorite-list] Space Loot

From: dorifry <dorifry_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:22:46 -0500
Message-ID: <588D31F003204F95A2A3D988D54B4EFF_at_DoriPC>

More on the space loot story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/science/space/nasa-tackles-problem-of-missing-moon-rocks.html

NASA Searches for Loot That Traveled From Space to Another Void

HOUSTON - West Virginia lost one, until it turned up one June day on a
bookshelf in the basement of a retired dentist. New York has one in a vault
at a museum in Albany, but another one given to the state for safekeeping
was not kept very safe, because it appears to be missing, though the
attorney general's office has started looking into the case.
Enlarge This Image

Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Joseph R. Gutheinz Jr., a lawyer in Texas who retired from NASA, has helped
track down dozens of missing moon rocks.

A long-lost one in Colorado resurfaced at the home of a former governor, and
another one in Arkansas was found among former President Bill Clinton's
memorabilia. Somebody swiped one from a museum in the island country of
Malta, and somebody else who got his hands on one in Honduras tried to sell
it in Miami to an undercover federal agent.

Rare art? Priceless jewels? Nothing so terrestrial.

All of these items were literally out of this world: moon rocks, meteorite
samples and other so-called astromaterials that were lent to researchers by
NASA or were offered as gifts to American and foreign leaders.

Hundreds of moon rocks and other space objects have been lost, destroyed,
stolen or remain unaccounted for, some of which American astronauts and
presidents presented to dignitaries around the country and the world decades
ago and others that NASA officials lent for education, research and public
display. The objects survived in outer space for ages and include some of
the first samples ever returned from another planetary body, but after just
a few short years on Earth they met the same fate as a set of car keys or a
29-cent postcard.

Six meteorite samples lost in the mail in 2004 were headed to a lab at the
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and have never been seen
since. In 1978, NASA lent a lunar sample disk to the Mount Cuba Astronomical
Observatory in Greenville, Del. By the time NASA inquired about the disk
more than 30 years later, the manager responsible for it had died and the
disk - a six-inch diameter disk with soil and rock materials from the moon -
was gone. NASA says the observatory could not locate it, but a member of the
observatory's board of trustees maintains that the manager sent it back to
NASA.

A piece of the moon weighing 1.1 grams - among lunar samples collected by
Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972 - was given to the governor of West
Virginia more than one year later. Its whereabouts were unknown in recent
years, until the fragment resurfaced in June 2010, in a box in the basement
game room of Robert T. Conner, a retired dentist.

The only connection between him and the governor who was presented the lunar
fragment, Arch A. Moore Jr., was Mr. Conner's brother, who died in 2002. Mr.
Moore had been a lawyer in the Washington law firm that the brother owned,
and the box containing the fragment included items from the man's office.
The fragment was about the size of a dime, encased in a Lucite ball and
mounted on a wooden plaque, and Mr. Conner had never given it much thought.

"It was not eye-catching at all, that's for sure," said Mr. Conner, 76. "I've
seen better-looking bowling trophies."

Last month, NASA's inspector general, Paul K. Martin, determined that 517
moon rocks and other astromaterial samples that were lent between 1970 and
2010 had been lost or stolen. A report issued by Mr. Martin's office found
that 11 of the 59 researchers in the Houston and Washington areas who were
audited could not account for all of the samples NASA had lent them, or the
agency found other discrepancies, including researchers who had items that
according to agency records either did not exist or had been lent to others.
The space agency had also failed to update its records for 12 researchers
who had died, retired or relocated, in some instances without returning the
samples. One researcher, the report noted, still had lunar samples he had
borrowed 35 years earlier though he never conducted research on them.

The report found that Johnson Space Center's Astromaterials Acquisition and
Curation Office in Houston, which maintains NASA's collection of 163,000
astromaterial samples, lacked sufficient control over its loans of moon
rocks and other items for research, education and public display. The
samples that American and foreign dignitaries received as gifts were not
included in the report, because the space agency does not track them.
Moon-rock experts say NASA should keep an inventory of those as well, and
they estimate that of nearly 400 moon rocks given to state and world leaders
after the Apollo 11 and 17 missions, almost 200 have been lost, destroyed or
stolen.

Spokesmen for NASA in Washington and Houston said the losses reported by the
inspector general represented only a small fraction of the tens of thousands
of astromaterial samples the space agency had lent to scientists around the
world for more than 40 years. In particular, the lost samples from the moon
amounted to less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the samples that were
safely returned in the past four decades.

"Although such losses at any time are regrettable, and NASA agrees with the
I.G. report that continuing to improve certain procedures could reduce the
rate at which they occur, the benefits to science of making these samples
available for study have vastly outweighed the tiny risk of loss," a NASA
spokesman in Houston, William P. Jeffs, said in a statement.

NASA officials said they were implementing the recommendations in the
report, which called for the space agency to require loan agreements for all
types of materials and strengthen the inventory verification process, among
other steps. Mr. Jeffs said that although several researchers involved in
losing samples were reprimanded in letters from NASA, their research
privileges were not revoked.

Few Americans have been as focused on moon rocks as Joseph R. Gutheinz Jr.,
a Texas lawyer who keeps a spinning globe on his desk reading, "Moon Rock
Hunter." The title is not official (the globe was a gift from one of his
sons), but it might as well be: Mr. Gutheinz and his criminal justice
students at the University of Phoenix and Alvin Community College in Alvin,
Tex., have helped track down 77 moon rocks that were missing, including
those presented to governors in Colorado, Missouri and West Virginia.

"If someone hands a governor a moon rock, and he keeps it or loses it, if
you can't protect something like that, maybe they're not that vigilant,"
said Mr. Gutheinz, a retired senior special agent in NASA's inspector
general office. "And if they're not that careful, and they bring it home
with them, what else have they brought home with them?"

Mr. Gutheinz was the undercover agent who led a Miami sting operation to
recover a moon rock stolen in Honduras in 1998. It was called Operation
Lunar Eclipse. Mr. Gutheinz ran an advertisement in USA Today reading, "Moon
Rocks Wanted," and a man called offering to sell him a real moon rock. The
asking price was $5 million.



Phil Whitmer

Joshua Tree Earth & Space Museum
Received on Mon 23 Jan 2012 11:22:46 AM PST