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© Igor Borisenko / TASS
NEW YORK, November 30th. / TASS /. Lunar soil samples, brought to Earth by the Luna-16 unmanned mission of the Soviet Union about half a century ago, were sold for $ 855,000 in New York on Thursday, Sotheby's auction house announced.
Three fragments, measuring between 1 and 2 mm, are enclosed under glbad in a 2 inch by 2 inch metal block placed under an adjustable magnifying lens. An inscription in Russian indicates "Luna-16 soil samples".
Three samples – the only known documented samples of the moon available for private property – originally belonged to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, chief designer and director of the Soviet Space Program. The samples were given to him as a gift from the USSR in recognition of the incalculable contributions of his late husband to the program.
They were shipped by her and sold at the Sotheby's Russian Space History sale in 1993, where they were purchased by an unknown private collector for $ 442,500.
The voice recorder that flew into space aboard the space shuttle Vostok-6 with the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova (June 16-19, 1963), is one of the other successes of the Sotheby & # 39 sale. Space Exploration, which has already grossed more than $ 2.5 million. 8 audio cbadettes of the flight; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's letter to Russian science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev; the book "Road to the Stars" by the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, with his autograph; Space Combinations Oran-M and Sokol KV-2 and other objects and works of art.
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