NOW THIS: HUNDREDS OF MOON ROCKS MISSING

AFP - Researchers have sticky fingers whenit comes to NASA's moon rocks and meteorites, and hundreds of samples have gonemissing after being loaned out by the US space agency, an audit said Thursday.

NASA Inspector General PaulMartin issued a report detailing foibles such as the US space agency makingloans to researchers who never used the samples, or simply losing track of rarepieces dating back to the first US trip to the Moon in 1969.

"According to NASArecords, 517 loaned astromaterials have been lost or stolen between 1970 andJune 2010," said the report.

Astromaterials include Moonrocks and soil; meteorites from asteroids, Mars, and the Moon; ions from theouter layers of the Sun; dust from comets and interstellar space; and cosmicdust from Earth's stratosphere.

"These samplesconstitute a rare and limited resource and serve an important role for researchand education," it added.

"Specifically, wefound that NASA records were inaccurate, and that researchers could not accountfor all samples loaned to them and held samples for extended periods withoutperforming research or returning the samples to NASA."

NASA needs a bettertracking system and should do an annual inventory to stop unnecessary sampleloss, the audit said.

"NASA concurred withour recommendations and promised to take corrective action," it added.

As of March, NASA had morethan 26,000 samples on loan, of a collection that totals 140,000 lunar samples,18,000 meteorite samples and 5,000 solar wind, comet, and cosmic dust samples.

NASA has admitted to losingsuch materials in the past. One researcher lost 18 lunar samples in 2010.

In 2002, 218 samples fromthe Moon and meteorites were stolen from Johnson Space Center in Houston butlater returned.

 

A NASA picture taken in 1972 shows a close-up view or "mug shot" of Apollo 16 lunar sample no. 68815, a dislodged fragment from a parent boulder. Researchers have sticky fingers when it comes to NASA's moon rocks and meteorites, and hundreds of samples have gone missing after being loaned out by the US space agency, an audit said Thursday.