Moon Rocks (1969)

Duration: 3:42

Year Published: 1969

Sound: silent

Description: This news footage for Houston’s KPRC-TV captures a NASA scientist studying Moon rocks at the Manned Spacecraft Center’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL). Broadcast on September 15, 1969, the samples most likely came from the Apollo 11 mission. The initial purpose of the LRL was to quarantine anyone and anything returning from the surface of the Moon. Seeing as no person had ever walked on the Moon before, NASA did not know whether or not exposure to lunar dust was biologically hazardous. In 1979, NASA built the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility as a permanent repository for Apollo samples. The LRL now hosts experiments related to the effects of microgravity.