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Three lunar rock samples taken during an unmanned Soviet mission in 1970 were purchased for $ 855,000 at an auction held Thursday in New York by Sotheby's auction house.
These fragments, brought to Earth by the Luna-16 mission, were first offered to the wife of Sergei Korolev, considered the father of the Soviet space program and died in 1966.
The final price, which includes commissions and fees, is almost double what was expected ($ 442,500) at the first sale of these samples, also at Sotheby's.
The selling price places it in the middle of the estimated range of the auction house, which was between $ 700,000 and $ 1 million.
According to Sotheby's, those proposed at the end of November are the only among all the listed fragments taken from the moon, both by the US and Soviet missions, which do not belong to any government.
The auction of a deal that Neil Armstrong had used to store the first lunar samples collected for $ 1.8 million during a sale at Sotheby's in New York, revealed that the Lunar missions had a certain appeal for collectors. July 2017
Although China managed to install a module on the Moon in 2013, the only samples that have been brought to Earth so far come from missions from the United States and the Soviet Union.
The United States has not returned since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, and Russia has not been on the moon since the end of the Soviet era and the Luna-24 flight in 1976 .
NASA plans to return with an inhabited flight in 2023 and China plans to build an inhabited base on the moon.
Previously, a private Israeli non-profit organization wanted to send an unmanned module in December, with a lunar landing scheduled for mid-February 2019.
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