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Three fragments of rocks recovered from the moon by a Soviet space mission in 1970 were sold at US $ 855,000 at an auction in New York.
Sotheby's auction house said the "rocks of the moon" are the only documented and known lunar matter in private hands.
They were offered for sale by an unidentified private American collector who bought them at auction in 1993 at a price of US $ 442,500 (US $ 605,000).
Sotheby's stated that Thursday's buyer was another private American collector, but the name was not revealed.
The auction house said before the sale that the fragments, whose size ranged from about 2 x 2 mm to 1 x 1 mm, could reach $ 1 million ($ A1.37 million).
The lunar samples originally belonged to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of the former director of the Soviet space program Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
They were offered to her as a gift from the Soviet Union in recognition of her husband's contributions to the program, said Sotheby's.
The particles were recovered in September 1970 by the unmanned Luna-16, which drilled a hole in the surface to a depth of 35 cm and extracted a sample of carrot, announced the auction house in a statement.
Most of the other known samples taken from the moon remain with the two entities that collected them: the United States during Apollo missions 11-17 and the Soviet Union via unmanned missions Luna-16, Luna-20 and Luna-24.
Collectors pay huge sums for space exploration artifacts. Last year, Sotheby's sold a zipper bag with the inscription "Lunar Sample Return" covered with moon dust. This command was used by Neil Armstrong during the first human mission to the moon in 1969, for US $ 1.1 million.
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