, Updated 14 Dec 2020, 14:10 GMT
Dr. Daniel H. Anderson, an aerospace technologist and test director in the Nonsterile Nitrogen Processing Laboratory in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center looks at much-discussed Apollo 14 basketball-size rock through a microscope. The two moon-exploring crew men of Apollo 14 brought back 90-odd pounds of lunar sample material from their two periods of extravehicular activity on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro area.
Photograph by NASA
On a clear December morning, a team of scientists followed a homing beacon into the remote Australian desert to collect precious material from outer space. The shoebox-size capsule, part of Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, held rocks and dust from Ryugu, a carbon-rich asteroid that likely harbours the building blocks of life. To keep the sample pristine, the capsule was whisked away to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center, a lab near Tokyo designed to prevent the cosmic material from being contaminated with earthly organisms.