Lunar Gold Rush: Genuine Moon Rock Up for Grabs!

What do I do with my Goodwill Moon Rock and how can I tell if my moon rock is real?

NASA, for no obvious reason, has recently announced that it has mislaid a large number of its precious moon rocks. About 184 lunar lumps have gone AWOL after they were given away as gifts.

Moon rock commands “astronomical” prices (yuk yuk) – just over a gram of the stuff is worth a cool $5 (£3.1 million). So the question is how to get your hands on some of this booty?

What to look for?

During the Nixon and Ford eras, 270 fragments of Selene were sent to politicians and countries around the world. Another hundred were gifted to the 50 US states.

The moon rock was encased in Lucite (aka Plexiglass) and attached to a wooden board, making the “goodwill gift” look like a charity-shop crystal ball nailed onto a plank of 2×4. A tatty fabric country flag was screwed down under another piece of Perspex to complete the impression of a kid’s science fair project.

This is the 24-carat stuff. Stone from the Apollo missions commands the premium prices. One of these with its self-authenticating plaque will get you the $5 million payday.

Missing in action: Alaska, New Jersey, Cyprus (claims it never got it), Ireland (lost in fire), Malta, Romania (revolution) and Spain. This is Nevada's Goodwill Rock (Image: Evan Schwartz (Courtesy Nevada State Museum, Carson City)

Lunar meteorites go for a lot less, but tiny fractions of a gram still fetch upwards of $50 on eBay. There are even reports of moondust collected from the Apollo spacesuits on a strip of sticky tape going for $300,000.

Get me some!

Lunar meteorites can be collected from the desert regions of Antarctica, Africa and Oman. None have been found in temperate zones (USA, Europe), mainly because weathering makes them indistinguishable from Earth rocks.

Ireland’s Goodwill Moon Rock is in Finglas municipal dump after it was thrown away with the rest of the debris from a fire at Dublin’s Dunsink Observatory. Although lunar basalts contain iron, they are not appreciably magnetic – lunatics after this pot of Irish gold will have put their metal detectors back in the cupboard. You won’t find them here.

Joseph Gutheinz Jr as "Tony Coriasso” – on your tail (Image: Joseph Gutheinz)

By far the most efficacious method is to post “Moon Rocks Wanted” in a newspaper or on the internet. This devious tactic employed by Joseph Gutheinz Jr, who ran Operation Lunar Eclipse, an undercover sting to recover the missing moon rocks in 1998.

Before making contact with a potential buyer, however, be warned – being in possession of a Goodwill Moon Rock that is not rightfully yours is a federal offense. In 2011, NASA busted a 74-year-old grandma when she attempted to sell a speck of lunar dust smaller than a grain of rice for 1.7 million.

How do you tell if it’s the genuine article?

Most moon rocks are “breccias”, composed of angular broken up fragments – the legacy of 4-billion years of bombardment from outer space. With no running water or atmosphere on the moon, there is no mechanism for transporting and sorting grains, so moon rocks have no layers, and are unsorted. Crust from the mares – the moon’s dark “seas” – are basalts, a dark, fine-grained crystalline volcanic stone.

They are mineralogically simple – 99 per cent of lunar material is composed of plagioclase feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and ilmenite minerals. They are also bone dry, containing none of the hydrated minerals that characterize Earth rocks.

If you have a mass spectrometer to hand, indicator elements are chromium (higher than seen in Earth rocks) and a very specific thorium to samarium ratio. Look for low concentrations of arsenic and potassium. Here is how to do it:

 

 

Lunar gold rush

To put the bonanza in perspective: the Apollo missions brought back 382 kg of moon rock, the Soviet Luna spacecraft returned with 0.32 kg and over 120 lunar meteorites have been found with a total mass of around 48 kg. NASA’s Goodwill Moon Rocks probably account for just 400 g of that 430.32 kg of stone – about a tenth of one per cent of the moon rock on Earth, and less than half of it is unaccounted for.

An additional difficulty for the space-age prospector is not all of the Goodwill Gifts are moon rocks. The Dutch diligently stored their lunar goodies in the vaults of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but in 2009 discovered that it was nothing more than lump of petrified wood – “a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone”. Remember all that glistens is not gold – happy hunting!

Sources/further reading:
In Search of the Goodwill Rocks: A Personal Account Joseph Gutheinz Jr
What Has Happened to NASA’s Missing Moon Rocks Mark Bosworth (BBC)
‘Moon Rock’ given to Holland is Fake Daily Telegraph
Moon Rock Wikipedia
Stolen and Missing Moon Rocks Wikipedia
How do We Know that it’s a Rock from the Moon Washington University in St. Louis