Apollo Moon Rocks Go Missing

Toby Sterling, Associated Press

Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?

The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.

Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.

"There is no doubt in my mind that many moon rocks are lost or stolen and now sitting in private collections," said Joseph Gutheinz, a University of Arizona instructor and former U.S. government investigator who has made a project of tracking down the lunar treasures.

The Rijksmuseum, more noted as a repository for 17th century Dutch paintings, announced last month it had had its plum-sized "moon" rock tested, only to discover it was a piece of petrified wood, possibly from Arizona. The museum said it inherited the rock from the estate of a former prime minister.

The real Dutch moon rocks are in a natural history museum. But the misidentification raised questions about how well countries have safeguarded their presents from Washington.

Genuine moon rocks, while worthless in mineral terms, can fetch six-figure sums from black-market collectors.

Of 135 rocks from the Apollo 17 mission given away to nations or their leaders, only about 25 have been located by CollectSpace.com, a Web site for space history buffs that has long attempted to compile a list.

That should not be taken to mean the others are lost -- just that the records kept at the time are far from complete.

The AP reviewed declassified correspondence between the State Department and U.S. embassies in 1973 and was able to locate ten additional Apollo 17 rocks -- in Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Barbados, France, Poland, Norway, Costa Rica, Egypt and Nepal.

But the correspondence yielded a meager 30 leads, such as the name of the person who received them or the museum where they were to be initially displayed. Ecuador and Cyprus are among several that said they had never heard of the rocks. Five were handed to African dictators long since dead or deposed.

The outlook for tracking the estimated 134 Apollo 11 rocks is even bleaker. The locations of fewer than a dozen are known.

"NASA turned over the samples to the State Department to distribute," said Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, a NASA historian, in an e-mailed response to questions. "We don't have any records about when and to whom the rocks were given."

"The Office of the Historian does not keep records of what became of the moon rocks, and to my knowledge, there is no one entity that does so," e-mailed Tiffany Hamelin, the State Department historian.

That may seem surprising now, but in the early 1970s, few expected Apollo 17 would be the last mission to the moon. With the passage of time, the rocks' value has skyrocketed.

NASA keeps most of the 382 kilograms (842 lbs) gathered by the Apollo missions locked away, giving small samples to researchers and lending a set of larger rocks for exhibitions.

Apollo 11 gift rocks typically weigh just 0.05 grams, scarcely more than a grain of rice. The Apollo 17 gift rocks weigh about 1.1 grams. Both are encased in plastic globes to protect them and ease viewing.

Each U.S. state got both sets of rocks, and Gutheinz said he and his students have accounted for nearly all the Apollo 17 rocks, though some are in storage and inaccessible. They have only just begun researching Apollo 11 rocks in the states.

In one known legal sale of moon samples, in 1993, moon soil weighing 0.2 grams from an unmanned Russian probe was auctioned at Sotheby's for $442,500.

Gutheinz, the former U.S. investigator, says ignorance about the rocks is an invitation to thieves, and he should know.

In 1998, he was working for the NASA Office of the Inspector General in a sting operation to uncover fake rocks when he was offered the real Apollo 17 rock -- the one given to Honduras -- for $5 million.

The rock was recovered and eventually returned to Honduras, but not before a fight in Florida District Court that went down in legal annals as "United States vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch By Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque."

The case is not unique.

Malta's Apollo 17 rock was stolen in 2004. In Spain, the newspaper El Mundo this summer reported that the Apollo 17 rock given to the country's former dictator, Francisco Franco, is missing.

Franco died in 1975. The paper quoted his grandson as denying the rock had been sold. He said his mother had lost it, but claimed it was the family's personal possession, to sell if it wished.

Gutheinz says Romania's Apollo 17 rock disappeared after the fall and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

According to Gutheinz and other reports, Pakistan's Apollo 17 rock is missing; so is Nicaragua's, since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979. Afghanistan's Apollo 17 rock sat in Kabul's national museum until it was ransacked in 1996.

In fact, the Netherlands is one of the few countries where the location of both the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 gift rocks is known. Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are others -- though none has rocks from both missions on permanent public display and some have been kept in storage for decades.

The Amsterdam case appears to be not fraud but the result of poor vetting by the Rijksmuseum.

Spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder said the museum checked with NASA after receiving the rock in 1992 from the estate of the late Prime Minister Willem Drees. NASA told the museum, without seeing it, that it was "possible" it was a moon rock.

But it weighed a whopping 89 grams (3.1 ounces). In addition, its gold-colored cardboard plaque does not describe it as a moon rock.

The U.S. ambassador gave Drees the rock during an Oct. 9, 1969 visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Netherlands. Drees's grandson, also named Willem, told the AP his grandfather had been out of office for more than a decade and was nearly deaf and blind in 1969, though his mind was still sharp.

"My guess is that he did not hear well what was said," said the grandson. "He may have formed his own idea about what it was."

The family never thought to question the story before donating the rock, to which it had not attached great importance or monetary value.

Story Source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/09/14/apollo-moon-rocks.html

Future Spaceships Flight to Mars in 2.5 Hours

Humans can build spaceships capable of reaching the Moon within minutes; a flight to Mars will take 2.5 hours, and a flight to Alpha Centauri, which is scores of light years away from Earth, will take a mere 80 days.

Incredible journeys can be a reality, say two German Doctors of Physics who put forth an audacious theory. Walter Dresher from the University of Innsbruck joined forces with Joachim Hoiser, a leading scientist with the German company HPCC-Space Gmbh.

“The German physicists build their work on a theory formulated by the German scientist Burkhard Heim. The theory was put together in the 1950s,” says Vadim Pimenov, deputy director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics under the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. “Heim, a brilliant physicist and philosopher, was the first scientist who began thinking over the principles of space flights using a “hyper-engine.”

The concept seems improbable at first sight. In actuality, it is a byproduct of the efforts aiming to combine the quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity – two theories that so far have successfully foiled all the attempts to make them “friendly,” mostly due to differences in the interpretation of space and time. Heim made use of the Einstein concept regarding gravitation as a manifestation of distortions in the “fabric” of space and time. However, he suggested that all kinds of fundamental interaction be considered a manifestation of the complete set of spatial dimensions.

Heim introduced two additional dimensions since the existing ones were not enough for proving his theory. The physicist reportedly proved that gravitation and electromagnetism could combine in his 6-D space. He also maintained that a gravitational force could turn into an electromagnetic one, and vice versa, under certain conditions. It is still unclear whether Heim succeeded in combining the quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity. For reasons unknown, the scientist refused to made public all details of his theory until he carried out a “decisive” experiment. The experiment did not materialize either due to technical reasons or a lack of funds.

“The German physicist Wolfgang Dresher dusted off Heim’s ‘strange ideas’ and threw in two more dimensions,” says Prof. Pimenov. “Dresher made a mathematical description of an 8-dimentional universe, the Heim-Dresher space, ‘featuring’ two more kinds of interaction,” says Prof. Pimenov.

Dresher’s colleague Joachim Hoizer, along with a U.S. scientist John Kelvin and a Russian academician Nikolai Kozyrev supported the theory. According to them, a fast-spinning circle combined with a ring-shaped magnet in a strong magnetic field can “push” a space ship to other dimensions where different values of the natural constants, including the speed of light, may exist. The machine will be capable of creating anti-gravitation by moving a spaceship in regular space. “We’re not trying to challenge the existing laws of physics, we are expanding our views on them,” said Kelvin.

“Academic scholars would have reacted quite skeptically to such argumentation had it taken place a few years ago,” says Prof. Pimenov. “Nowadays the situation has changed. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently published a list of last year’s award winners for the best theoretical works in aerospace research.

“The instructions for a space drive based on the Heim quantum theory” by Hoiser and Dresher was awarded in the category “The Future Flight.”

According to New Scientist, the work is a collection of speculations on the possibility of making a material object pass into the so-called parallel space (or “other universes) and return.

The dreams of a time machine are beginning to take shape in America . The so-called Z-machine is being built by the American National Laboratory Sandia. The machine is one of the world’s most powerful “impulse” sources of a magnetic field and the most powerful generator of roentgen rays. Similar experiments are being conducted in Moscow , by the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics under the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Story source: http://english.pravda.ru

Building block of life found on comet

Source: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre57h02i-us-space-comet-life/

By Steve GormanPosted 2009/08/18 at 9:37 am EDT

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 18, 2009 (Reuters) — The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

An artist's concept of the gas and dust around comet Wild 2. REUTERS/NASA/JPL/Handout

---

Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.

Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.

Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets.

The initial detection of glycine, the most common of 20 amino acids in proteins on Earth, was reported last year, but it took time for scientists to confirm that the compound in question was extraterrestrial in origin.

"We couldn't be sure it wasn't from the manufacturing or the handling of the spacecraft," said astrobiologist Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the principal author of the latest research.

She presented the findings, accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, to a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., this week.

"We've seen amino acids in meteorites before, but this is the first time it's been detected in a comet," she said.

Chains of amino acids are strung together to form protein molecules in everything from hair to the enzymes that regulate chemical reactions inside living organisms. But scientists have long puzzled over whether these complex organic compounds originated on Earth or in space.

The latest findings add credence to the notion that extraterrestrial objects such as meteorites and comets may have seeded ancient Earth, and other planets, with the raw materials of life that formed elsewhere in the cosmos.

"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said Carl Pilcher, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute in California, which co-funded the research.

Glycine and other amino acids have been found in a number of meteorites before, most notably one that landed near the town of Murchison, Australia in 1969, Elsila said.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)