Moon dust that was forgotten for almost 40 years has recently been found in storage in California. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected the historic space dust and moon rocks on Apollo 11.

A local archivist, Karen Nelson, found the vials of moon dust at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from a warehouse at the national lab. The 20 vials of moon dust collected by Armstrong and Aldrin were found earlier this month. The vials had been gathering, well, Earth dust as they sat in storage.

Nelson was going through random things tucked in storage when she found the vials of moon dust. Apparently, after astronauts came back from Apollo 11, the moon dust and rocks they collected were to be studied. The moon dust and rocks were were sent to Berkeley-- among about 150 other institutions-- to be analyzed and experimented on. After this was over, the samples were supposed to be sent back to NASA, but they ended up in storage and forgotten about.

The laboratory simply said, "We don't know how or when they ended up in storage...They were surprised we had the samples". The vials were vacuum sealed in a glass jar, they confirmed. They were found with a paper entitled,

"Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples."  The paper was published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971.

Nelson has let NASA know, and they said that it should be returned-but that she is allowed to open the sealed jar to look more closely at the vials first.

It just goes to show that one never knows what they'll find poking around in lost and forgotten corners. Maybe even moon rocks and space dust. Or just, well, that long-lost box of Christmas ornaments and some musty books.