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Rich space lovers will have the chance to own three small particles of lunar matter when what Sotheby's describes as the only known and legally available "lunar rocks" for private property has been launched at auction in November.
Sotheby's declared: Tuesday, he expects that the fragments, recovered from the moon by a Soviet space mission in 1970, will reach between 700,000 USD and 1 million USD when sold to auction in New York on November 29th.
The pieces – a fragment of basalt, similar to most volcanic rocks on Earth, and surface debris known as the regolith – are sold by an unidentified private American collector who bought them in 1993.
Sotheby's sa declared in a statement, they were sold for the first time in 1993 by Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of the former director of the Soviet space program Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
The fragments, ranging in size from about 0.079 inches x 0.079 inches (2 x 2 mm) to 0.039 inches x 0.039 inches (1 x 1 mm), were presented to him as a gift from the Soviet Union in recognition of the contributions of his late husband to the program.
Sotheby's stated that the particles, enclosed under glbad with a Russian plate, are both the only known lunar specimen to have been officially offered to a private party, and whose documented provenance is available for the property private.
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, which was used by Neil Armstrong for the first human mission on the Moon in 1969. It cost $ 1.8 million.
NASA lost a legal battle to recover the artifact from a private collection.
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.
A number of other countries have received samples of Apollo 11 and goodwill rocks from Apollo 17 on behalf of the Nixon administration and, in most places, bars
Particles sold in November were recovered in September 1970 by Luna-16, who drilled a hole in the surface to a depth of 35 cm (13.8 inches) and extracts a central sample.
They are packed under glbad under an adjustable lens and marked "ЧАСТИЦЫ ГРУНТА ЛУНЫ-16" [SOIL PARTICLES FROM LUNA-16].
Tests on similar samples showed that the bits were at least 3.4 billion years old.
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