Sealed for 50 Years, Rare Apollo Lunar Sample Will Have Its Opening Day

In 1972, when geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt spotted a patch of unusual orange soil on the moon, he knew it was special, but he wasn’t sure exactly why. “Until it was possible to look at this material in the laboratory under high resolution and analyze it, we did not know that we had found a deposit of volcanic ash,” he says.

Fifty years later, Schmitt still isn’t aware of all the discoveries his mission will yield. That’s because researchers in the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) program are only recently beginning to study lunar samples that had been saved for future scientists. Their projects aim to answer critical questions about the moon’s past and, as the Artemis program prepares for launch in the next few years, lunar exploration’s future.