One early Saturday morning around 1975 I walked into the Berkeley Physics Dept. student machine shop. A bunch of nerds were clustered around a big lathe that no one ever used because it had so much backlash. Chucked in the lathe was a vacuum flange monolithically attached to a broken glass tube that menacingly stuck out from the headstock. Inside the glass tube was some black gritty shit. The ways of the lathe had been carefully covered with pristine Kim-Wipes. I gathered that this was part of a mass spectrometer.
The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. “We have to account for every last gram of this NASA sample.”
There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.
Half-way through reading the article I descended down a Wikipedia rabbit hole that eventually led me to this article [0] and dreaming of what it would be like to touch a moon rock. Thank you for your story!
I recall touching one 3-4 times in my life at science museums. I’m not sure if my memory is totally correct on that but there is definitely one you can touch at Kennedy space Centre.
The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. “We have to account for every last gram of this NASA sample.”
There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.