After 50 Years, Scientists Set to Open Sealed Apollo Soil Sample

The sample has been largely untouched since the Apollo 17 mission, during which astronaut Gene Cernan collected soil from a landslip deposit that fell into the Taurus-Littrow Valley. Cernan hammered a 70-centimeter cylindrical tube into the ground to extract a core soil sample, the bottom half of which was sealed in a vacuum-tight chamber. Back on Earth, the sample was placed inside an extra vacuum chamber for safekeeping in the hope that in the future, more advanced technology would make better use of the soil sample.

Now the ESA and its Apollo Next-Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) program are hoping to extract precious gasses from the soil’s container, allowing them to develop new sample return containers and protocols.

Scientists are aiming to find hydrogen, helium, and other light gasses inside, but capturing those gasses upon opening the sample is easier said than done. The ESA is working with documentation that’s half a century old, and it doesn’t exactly cover how to pop open the sample container without losing the invisible matter inside. It took ANGSA 16 months to create a solution—lovingly called the “Apollo can opener”—which is designed to carefully puncture the vacuum container. Members of ANGSA delivered the tool to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in November.

When researchers are ready to open the sample, the Apollo can opener’s function will be performed inside of an extraction manifold designed by Washington University in Saint-Louis, Missouri. The manifold will capture the gasses, allowing researchers to distribute them among several containers and send them to specialty labs around the world for analysis.

The ANGSA team is hoping the information gleaned by analyzing the Apollo sample will inform future Moon missions, like ESA’s PROSPECT and NASA’s Artemis program. An improved understanding of sample extraction from lunar polar regions may also benefit NASA’s upcoming VIPER mission, in which a rover will explore the South Pole of the Moon.

“The opening and analyses of these samples now, with the technical advancements achieved since the Apollo era, can enable new scientific discoveries on the Moon,” said Francesca McDonald, science and project lead of ESA’s contribution to ANGSA, in a press release. “This can also inspire and inform a new generation of explorers.”

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