THE first piece of Moon rock to go under the auctioneer鈥檚 hammer was promptly seized by the FBI last week because it might be stolen US government property.
A chunk of rock collected during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 went missing the following year. Officials at NASA had sent it through the post to a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, but the rock never arrived. The mail thief was convicted but never revealed what had happened to the haul.
Last weekend one of the star lots at a sale in New York was a fragment of Moon rock weighing 13 grams. Initially, Phillips the auctioneers had said the rock was given away by an Apollo 12 astronaut, but it changed that description after one of the astronauts complained that they had no authority to give away Moon rocks.
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NASA has not yet confirmed that the rock really is from the Moon, says spokeswoman Eileen Hawley. But a piece matching its description is missing. The Apollo astronauts brought 383 kilograms of rock back to Earth, and 64 pieces weighing 35 grams have been 鈥渓ost鈥�.
Hawley is confident that NASA鈥檚 scientists would be able to identify the rock. When the lunar rocks were brought to Earth, each chunk was photographed from several angles. 鈥淚f you were to present them with a rock, they could tell you whether it was from the Moon and from which mission.鈥�