The family of a scientist in the Czech Republic has been told to hand over precious lunar dust to the Academy of Sciences in Prague after keeping the material for decades.
The matter came to light when an export licence for the material as a cultural artefact was applied for, presumably with a view to selling it to collectors abroad.
The academy sued the family of the former employee for the return of the material and has now been vindicated in a ruling by the Supreme Court.
Soviet lunar probes collected the material in the 1970s. According to the judgment, the material consists of around 1 gram of lunar rock fragments and 1 gram of lunar dust, stored in 16 ampoules and sample containers.
The scientist’s daughter had argued that no one at the academy had missed the material in over 30 years. The judges found that the scientist had received the lunar samples during a research trip to the Soviet Union as a representative of the Czech Academy of Sciences – and not as a private individual.
Lunar dust and moon rocks brought back to Earth are almost without exception state property. Just under nine years ago, a bag containing a remnant of lunar dust was auctioned in New York for around $1.9 million. US astronaut Neil Armstrong, who died in 2012, brought back rock samples from the moon in 1969 in the bag.
