Hold the moon in your hands at the Montreal Science Center

A new exhibition at the Montreal Science Center allows visitors to touch a real piece of lunar rock

The specimen, lent by NASA, is the tenth of its kind to be exhibited in museums around the world.

"It was really a privilege," said Cybèle Robichaud, director of programming at the Science Center, located in the Old Port of Montreal.

The moonstone was nearly four billion years old and was collected in 1972 mission to the moon – Apollo 17.

When the center contacted NASA for the first time, it was only s & # 39; He was never waiting to get a lunar rock sample that people actually had permission to put.

She said that the museum's request was probably stimulated by a certain Canadian astronaut who is now the Governor General of Canada.

"The support letter from Julie Payette, our director at the time, really helped," said Robichaud

Payette was director general of the Montreal Science Center for three years before his nomination at Rideau Hall

The stone will be on display at the Science Center for at least five years.

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The team's project manager, Sara Arsenault, had to travel to Houston, Texas, to retrieve the rock of NASA's chests and bring it back to Canada in a discreet container – in this case, a lunch box. "For customs officers, when you have something like a lunchbox, they want to know what's in it, so I've had to say over and over again," I've got a lunar rock. " Arsenault said

"They were not ready for that."

A visitor of museum, Carolina Viger, saw the same type of lunar rock exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC

"What is special, is that not only old, because it comes from the moon, but also from the Apollo mission and the people who brought it back. "It's all the technology behind all this, all the innovation."

"This is not easy rock to get."