Moon Rocks Still Awe, And Scientists Hope To Get Their Hands On More
"Darby Dyar says that as a kid, whenever Apollo astronauts returned from the moon,
she and her classmates would get ushered into the school library to watch it on TV."
"She remembers seeing the space capsules bobbing in the ocean as the astronauts emerged. "They climbed out and then they very carefully took the lunar samples and put them in the little rubber boat," Dyar says, recalling that the storage box looked like an ice chest."
"Nearly a half-ton of moon rocks were collected by the six Apollo missions to the lunar surface. And as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first landing mission approaches, NASA has decided to open a still-sealed, never-studied moon rock sample that has been carefully saved for decades, waiting for technology to advance."
"Dyar is one of the scientists picked to do experiments on this pristine sample. She has spent her whole career studying the moon rocks she first saw on television as a child, although back then she never would have guessed it."
"'I was growing up in Indiana in the 1960s. Girls didn't do science,' Dyar says. 'I never saw a woman scientist.'"