[meteorite-list] Space Loot

[dorifry]

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