Apollo Sample News

Ryan Zeigler, Apollo Curator

Volume 6 No. 2 • October 2024

Before I get to the announcements below, since I know not everyone comes here for my "witty banter", I am pleased to announce that the next Apollo sample request deadline is Monday November 4^th at 5 PM Houston time. Please see the Curation website here, here, and here for more details on the deadline and the submission process. For PIs looking for more information about the samples as they prepare their requests, I highly recommend the Lunar Sample Compendium and the Apollo Sample and Photo Database. Another resource that PIs might find helpful are scanned copies of most of the historic Apollo Sample Catalogs; of particular note we've added two catalogs about the Surveyor 3 spacecraft parts collected during the Apollo 12 mission, which are available for request. If anything is unclear, please email me for clarification at any time, and all Apollo sample requests should be emailed directly to me at ryan.a.zeigler@nasa.gov.

I would like to congratulate Andrea Mosie, who has been the Apollo Lab Manager and Lead Apollo Sample processor for the past 40+ years. Recently, at a ceremony in the US Capitol Building, Andrea Mosie accepted a Congressional Gold Medal from US speaker of the House Mike Johnson on behalf of the women who served at NASA/NACA as human computers, mathematicians, and engineers from the 1930s to the 1970s. You can watch the ceremony on YouTube, see Andrea get the medal here, and see her comments here. We are so grateful for all that Andrea has accomplished and the positive impact she continues to have on the Apollo collection. Andrea is part of the fabric that binds the legacy of Apollo, and I am personally honored to have worked with her these past 13 years.

Figure 1: Photograph of Andrea Mosie receiving the Congressional Gold Medal from US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, on behalf of the women who served at NASA/NACA as human computers, mathematicians, and engineers from the 1930s to the 1970s.

In other personnel news, we are sad to announce that lunar sample processor Hannah O'Brien has left the Lunar Lab to pursue other opportunities here at Johnson Space Center. We'd like to thank Hannah for her work in the Lunar Lab over the last few years, and we wish her well in her new endeavor (as Lab manager of the Lunar Simulants lab). Last, but certainly not least, we'd like to welcome new lunar sample processor Lokin Casturi to the Team. Lokin joined us recently from the oil and gas industry, and while he is still quite new, we expect great things from him.

Figure 2: Photograph of new lunar processor Lokin Casturi looking through the Apollo sample display cabinet.

Finally, I'd like to speak for a moment about some facility related things:

• As I'm sure many of you saw, Hurricane Beryl came ashore near Houston as a Category 1 Hurricane on July 8, 2024. Beryl was not a particularly powerful hurricane, but it had an outsized impact on the Houston area. Although the curation facilities came through the storm essentially undamaged, the homes and day-to-day lives of folks living in the Houston area were significantly impacted, and we have experienced significant delays in laboratory work related to that event.
• An even larger impact to laboratory productivity is looming on the horizon. We have a planned 1-week power outage scheduled for early November here in the curation facility at JSC. This outage is required in order to bring our new building-wide back-up generator online. This natural gas fed generator will automatically provide building wide power to all of the curation and research facilities here in Building 31 and 31N in the event of unexpected power loss (e.g., Hurricanes) in the future. Obviously for a power outage of this duration, significant efforts are required to keep the samples safe and secure, and while we are confident we can do so without impacting the long term health of the samples or labs, it will require 1-2 weeks of dedicated work to prepare for the outage, as well as 1-2 weeks to bring the labs back to normal operating conditions after the outage.
• Finally, we expect that the newly constructed Building 31 Annex, which contains several new curation laboratories, to be officially completed in early 2025. After it is completed, there will be a period of a few months where we move into the new building and bring the new curation labs online. Details of these new labs will be provided in a future version of this newsletter, but I mention it here in passing because the effort to bring these labs online will definitely have a minor but notable impact on our day-to-day work in the Apollo Lab.

Thus, between the disruption already caused by Hurricane Beryl and the upcoming disruptions caused by the power outage and moving into the new facility, new sample allocations to PIs might take slightly longer than normal this Winter and into next Spring. We appreciate your patience on this topic in advance.