NASA stopped the sale of the “Moon cockroaches”, insects that had been fed lunar soil
NASA has ordered the auction house “RR Auction” to stop the sale of a lot of dissected cockroaches (and samples of their tissues), which were fed with lunar soil.
The agency said it owns the lot, which was part of the biological experiments conducted in 1969, during the Apollo era.
At the end of May, RR Auction put up for auction a buggy lot, it included:
- three corpses of dissected red cockroaches
- two sets of glass slides with preparations of their tissues
- semi-digested lunar soil extracted from the stomachs of insects
The cockroaches were delivered to Earth by the Apollo 11 crew in 1969 and studied by entomologist Marion Brooks of St. Paul's University.
This collection was owned by Brooks, who had been researching the potential pathogenicity and toxicity of lunar soil.
The auction was supposed to end on June 23, but shortly before that, NASA demanded RR Auction to stop the auction ahead of schedule.
The agency claimed the legal ownership of all the items, as they are part of the experiments conducted by NASA's Labs.
A NASA spokesman said the agency “had no knowledge that Marion Brooks' daughter originally sold the items to the Regency-Superior auction house in 2010”.
The spokesman also said that any continuation of the sale would be treated as an illegal disposal of the agency's property. Yikes.
The auction house initially rejected NASA's request to stop the sales, asking for clarification on the details of such a decision.
However, RR Auction later changed its position and withdrew the lot with the moon cockroaches.
Now all the parties will establish the legal ownership of the lot. After that, all its components can be returned to the agency.
This is not the first time that space material is sold by an auction: In April, Bonhams sold a microscopic sample of Apollo 11 moon dust for $504,375.
And in 2018, three pebbles brought back by the former Soviet Union's Luna 16 robotic mission were sold by Sotheby's for $855,000.
Sources:
You can only get one vote from the #fintech tag in the same day. This is why your post was not upvoted.
Oh okay. The previous post was techically written yesterday, but it's good to know. Thank you!