At the #CSIROTweetup we were told how valuable their tiny Moon Rock is. But NASA has been losing them all over!

517. That's the number of moon, comet and space dust samples that NASA has lost between the 1970s and 2010.

When we tweeps were at the CSIRO Tweetup at the Tidbinbila Tracking Station we were told that the little Moon pebble they have on display there has been valued at several millions of dollars.

Pic:  http://somers1999.blogspot.com/2011/09/canberra-act-8th-september.html   

New Scientist reports that NASA feels that most of the problems occurred years ago and they've tightened things up since then. But they are still managing to lose stuff, with samples of comet dust from the recent Stardust mission going missing before they could even be studied...

NASA also explain away the Moon rock losses thus "Losses of Apollo samples have amounted to less than one-hundredth of 1 per cent of the returned samples." Oh that's all right then.

They even tried to blame the post.

Incredible!