Who was the first person to touch lunar material with…
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Who was the first person to touch lunar material with their bare skin?
I'm curious as to who the first person to touch lunar material with their bare skin was.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to walk on the moon. But to be precise, they did not set \*foot\* on the moon - they set \*boot\* on the moon. That is, they did not touch the moon with the skin of their feet, or any other body part for that matter. Since the Moon is inhospitable to human life unless one wears a full-body spacesuit, none of them intentionally touched the Moon while they were there.
("Intentionally" being an important word, since Harrison Schmitt reported accidentally getting lunar dust in his suit and even his helmet during Apollo 17. He even breathed in some of it, so at least one human has \*inhaled\* the Moon. He found it quite irritating - similar to an allergic reaction.)
Of course, there were samples of lunar material brought back to Earth from the Apollo missions and from various sample-return missions. Since Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission, there was ample time for someone to touch the Moon before then. But I don't know. Early on, NASA was careful about possibly infecting Earth with theoretical Moon diseases. Even after fear of that waned, lunar samples are important scientific artifacts and their scientific value is degraded if they're infected with earth biota from being touched. Even so, NASA isn't perfect. My leading theory is that some unknown NASA scientist may have been the first to touch the Moon - sometime after Apollo 11.
There are lunar meteorites, of course - material from the Moon ejected to Earth by chance through impact events on the Moon. Perhaps some ancient caveman was the first to touch the Moon by picking up a weird-looking rock, though we have no record of it. In 1982, American geologist John Schutt found an unusual meteorite in Antarctica that was later proved to have come from the Moon - the first known lunar meteorite. While I assume that someone picked it up during that time, I don't think that counts.
Lastly and perhaps least importantly, the prevailing theory is that the Moon was originally formed from the Earth after some gigantic impact event spewed a huge chunk of the early Earth out into orbit, so really, we're always touching the Moon, since the Moon is made of Earth. That's the most liberal definition and I don't consider it valid for the purpose of this question, but thought I should acknowledge it.
So who was really the first to touch the Moon? If we narrowly define "lunar material" to include only material brought back from the Apollo missions and later sample-return missions, my guess is that someone in NASA may have been the first human to touch lunar material with their bare skin. It may not have even been recognized as a big deal at the time. But I have no idea who that might have been.
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I'm curious as to who the first person to touch lunar material with their bare skin was.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to walk on the moon. But to be precise, they did not set \*foot\* on the moon - they set \*boot\* on the moon. That is, they did not touch the moon with the skin of their feet, or any other body part for that matter. Since the Moon is inhospitable to human life unless one wears a full-body spacesuit, none of them intentionally touched the Moon while they were there.
("Intentionally" being an important word, since Harrison Schmitt reported accidentally getting lunar dust in his suit and even his helmet during Apollo 17. He even breathed in some of it, so at least one human has \*inhaled\* the Moon. He found it quite irritating - similar to an allergic reaction.)
Of course, there were samples of lunar material brought back to Earth from the Apollo missions and from various sample-return missions. Since Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission, there was ample time for someone to touch the Moon before then. But I don't know. Early on, NASA was careful about possibly infecting Earth with theoretical Moon diseases. Even after fear of that waned, lunar samples are important scientific artifacts and their scientific value is degraded if they're infected with earth biota from being touched. Even so, NASA isn't perfect. My leading theory is that some unknown NASA scientist may have been the first to touch the Moon - sometime after Apollo 11.
There are lunar meteorites, of course - material from the Moon ejected to Earth by chance through impact events on the Moon. Perhaps some ancient caveman was the first to touch the Moon by picking up a weird-looking rock, though we have no record of it. In 1982, American geologist John Schutt found an unusual meteorite in Antarctica that was later proved to have come from the Moon - the first known lunar meteorite. While I assume that someone picked it up during that time, I don't think that counts.
Lastly and perhaps least importantly, the prevailing theory is that the Moon was originally formed from the Earth after some gigantic impact event spewed a huge chunk of the early Earth out into orbit, so really, we're always touching the Moon, since the Moon is made of Earth. That's the most liberal definition and I don't consider it valid for the purpose of this question, but thought I should acknowledge it.
So who was really the first to touch the Moon? If we narrowly define "lunar material" to include only material brought back from the Apollo missions and later sample-return missions, my guess is that someone in NASA may have been the first human to touch lunar material with their bare skin. It may not have even been recognized as a big deal at the time. But I have no idea who that might have been.
#space
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