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Apollo Moon Rocks: "Lunar Curatorial Facility Resource" 1989 NASA
🕑 Added 2020-11-26 21:18:09 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Silent. 'This video shows daily activities in the Lunar Curatorial Facility. The video covers the various studies being conducted on lunar dust, rock, and core samples brought back by Apollo crews. Released July 1989.'
Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Sample_Laboratory_Facility
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility (LSLF) is a repository and laboratory facility at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, opened in 1979 to house geologic samples returned from the Moon by the Apollo program missions to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. The facility preserves most of the 382 kilograms (842 lb) of lunar material returned over the course of Apollo program and other extraterrestrial samples, along with associated data records. It also contains laboratories for processing and studying the samples without contamination...
History
Planning for handling returned lunar samples began early in the Apollo program. In 1964, a proposal was made for a small (10 square meters (110 sq ft)) sample receiving laboratory equipped with remote-controlled manipulators operating in a sterile, high-vacuum chamber to prepare samples for distribution to scientists, and this proposal was subsequently expanded to include a clean room with analytical instruments for performing preliminary analyses on the samples.
A committee of the Space Science Board reviewed the idea of a lunar sample receiving laboratory and sought to address multiple concerns...
The result of this planning was the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) in Building 37 at the Johnson Space Center, built to process and conduct basic analysis on lunar materials and to quarantine the materials and astronauts. (The requirement that astronauts be quarantined following their missions was dropped beginning with Apollo 15.) The 8,000-square-meter (86,000 sq ft) LRL was completed in 1967 at a cost of $7.8 million. The LRL was used for study, distribution and safe storage of the samples, but although the LRL had adequate facilities to process samples for the current mission, the facility was not ideal, and it lacked facilities to process or store samples from previous missions. To address some of these concerns, NASA dropped the requirement after Apollo 12 that samples be processed in vacuum (in favor of a simpler-to-work-in nitrogen atmosphere). An additional vault and, subsequently, a new laboratory – the Sample Storage and Processing Laboratory (SSPL) – were built in Building 31 of the Johnson Space Center. All lunar samples were moved from the LRL to Building 31 after the last Apollo mission.
Nonetheless, there were still concerns about the adequacy of the facility and about the wisdom of maintaining the entire collection of lunar samples in a single facility that might be vulnerable to natural disasters (especially the hurricanes to which Houston is vulnerable) and military actions. The collection was divided among multiple vaults at the Johnson Space Center while a vault was built in an empty ammunition bunker at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas as second-site storage. Fourteen percent of the lunar sample collection was moved to this bunker in 1976, transported secretly at night with a police escort in a specially modified passenger bus. This smaller collection of materials remained at Brooks until 2002, when the base was transitioned from military control as part of the Base Realignment and Closure process. The second-site lunar materials were then moved to the White Sands Test Facility, where a new, smaller facility was built inside an existing secure building to house the samples. Of the 382 kilograms (842 lb) of lunar samples returned by the Apollo program, 52 kilograms (115 lb) are currently stored at White Sands.
With a selection of the lunar samples secured offsite, construction began on the LSLF, with state-of-the-art facilities for handling the samples and better protection against natural disasters. The LSLF was constructed in a new annex of Building 31 (Building 31N at the Johnson Space Center) beginning in 1977. Built for a cost of $2.5 million, the building was dedicated on July 20, 1979, the tenth anniversary of the first manned Moon landing...
