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NEW YORK: Three rock fragments recovered from the moon by a Soviet space mission in 1970 were sold for 855,000 USD at an auction in New York on Thursday 29 November.
Sotheby's auction house said the "moon rocks" are the only documented lunar material known and owned by individuals. They were offered for sale by an unidentified private American collector who bought them at an auction in 1993 at a price of $ 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 $ 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 presented 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 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 during the first human mission on the Moon in 1969, priced at 1.8 million US dollars.
(Report by Jill Serjeant, edited by Sonya Hepinstall)
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