A private sale of Apollo 11 haul; plus, the superpower of bats
|  | Thursday, April 14, 2022 | | | | |
 | | NASA | | By Victoria Jaggard
Sticky dust. A shady museum director. A lawsuit against NASA. These are just some of the unusual players in a drama that started in 1969 and culminated this week at a New York City auction house.
The dust comes from the first sample astronaut Neil Armstrong scooped up from the surface of the moon during Apollo 11 (pictured above, fellow Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin). Normally NASA is highly protective of any lunar samples from the Apollo missions, even conducting a sting operation outside a Denny’s to get back a piece of moon rock. But due to a string of bizarre events, five samples of moon dust ultimately became some of the few bits of Apollo material that can be sold legally; they went to a bidder Wednesday at auction for a little more than $500,000.
Space scientists have had mixed reactions to the sale, as Maya Wei-Haas reports. “The obligatory response is that every sample is important and can tell you something new,” Baylor University’s Peter James told her. NASA, however, only got to analyze this dust when they verified its authenticity, and the grains are only a small fraction of the lunar samples the agency holds for scientific study. Still, pristine bits of the moon are not easy to come by on Earth, other experts contend. Meanwhile, space lawyers are intrigued by what this sale might mean for future attempts to extract and use resources from space—an issue that is already stirring debate.
Read the full story here. | | | |
 | BONHAMS
| | What $500,000 gets you: The auctioned lunar dust sold Wednesday (pictured above) was sprinkled atop aluminum stubs and bound with a layer of carbon tape.
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 | PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA GROO, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
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| | I come to drink your … water: A tent-making bat flies down to a pond in Ecuador’s section of the Amazon. Photographer Javier Aznar saw this and other bats swooping down to the pond to drink. He never thought he’d get a quality image at night. Bats have the fastest horizontal movement of any animal on earth and a built-in sonar system, Nat Geo reports. “It is clear that bats really do have superpowers,” says ecologist and Nat Geo Explorer Rodrigo Medellín. | | | |
| EARTH MONTH: ARTICLE OF THE DAY | |
PHOTOGRAPH BY KARINE AIGNER
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY JASPER DOEST | | | Saving the elephants: The rainforests of Gabon are some of the last strongholds for forest elephants, whose numbers in Central Africa have suffered a dramatic decline. Researchers have discovered that Earth’s warming temperatures could be lowering the fruit yield of many species of the rainforest trees, which in turn seems to be causing forest elephants to go hungry, National Geographic’s May issue reports. (Pictured above, a forest elephant reaching for fruit from a tree in Gabon’s Lopé National Park.) | | | |
 | | I love Sumatran rhinos ... They choose to live far from human activities, and even from other animals. They don't like noise. They are shy yet they are so strong. They need very high privacy but this does not mean they are selfish. | | | | Rudi Putra | | Conservation biologist, Nat Geo Explorer | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN J. SKERRY, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
| | | It’s Dolphin Day! Seriously. April 14 is set aside as a national day to raise awareness of one of our highly intelligent, iconic marine mammals. In the last several decades the day has been recognized, scientists have learned much about the more than 40 species of dolphins. (Pictured above, Nat Geo Explorer Brian Skerry captures an image of a school of dusky dolphins in Argentina.) See more of our most intimate dolphin photographs. | | | |
| This newsletter was curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Do you have an idea or a link for the newsletter? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. If you want our daily newsletter, sign up here. Have a good weekend ahead. | |
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