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The lunar samples belonged originally to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of the former director of the Soviet Space Program
Three rock fragments recovered from the moon by a Soviet space mission in 1970 were sold for $ 855,000 at auction in New York on Thursday.
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 for $ 442,500.
Sotheby's stated that Thursday's buyer was another private American collector, but the name was not revealed.
The auction house stated prior to the sale that the fragments, ranging in size from about 0.079 inch x 2 mm (2 x 2 mm) to 0.039 inch x 0.039 inch (1 x 1 mm), could go as far as to $ 1 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 (13.8 inches) and extracted a sample of carrot, announced the auction house. auction in a press release.
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 and used by Neil Armstrong for the first human mission on the moon in 1969 , priced at $ 1.8 million.
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