moon – Georneys

A lunar sampling bag on display at the Queensland Museum, July 2019.

This week, I’m sharing a picture of a lunar sampling bag. Bags such as this one were used to collect rocks during the Apollo missions to the moon. This particular bag even went to the moon’s surface in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission. How neat is that!

Here’s a sign with some additional information on the bag:

Museum information sign. See the information under point #2.

I took this picture on Sunday when my husband and I visited the NASA – A Human Adventure exhibit at the Queensland Museum here in Brisbane, Australia. This exhibit is on display because this year marks 50 years since the first humans stepped foot on the moon in July 1969.

The exhibit is on display until October. I highly recommend a visit if you find yourself in the Brisbane area! Otherwise, be sure to check out some of the other commemorative exhibits happening around the globe in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing – for example, the touring Destination Moon exhibit.

If you think that regular geological field work and sampling can be challenging, try doing those tasks in a spacesuit. During my recent (June 2014) trip to Washington, DC, I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Among many wonderful things, I saw a display that included some sampling tools that astronauts in spacesuits used to help them collect samples from the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. You can read more about these sampling tools here, and you can read more about the geology of the moon here.

Below are a few more pictures of the lunar geological sampling tools. My apologies for the poor quality of the images The displays were difficult to photograph with my point-and-shoot camera.