I'd like to address this issue of missing Apollo samples as a researcher.
I just checked my inventory. I have 999 (really!) line items of
samples from the 6 Apollo and 3 Russian Luna landing sites from
NASA. I can think of only 1 or 2 other researchers who might have
more. The total mass is 320.064 g (0.08% of the collection). That's
an average of 0.32 g/sample. But, even that number is
misleading. The mass distribution looks like this.
http://meteorites.wustl.edu/Korotev_NASA_Apollo_&_Luna_samples.jpg
Only 49 of the samples exceed 1 gram is mass. All of the samples >3
g are not "rocks" but regolith (alias soil or dust) samples. The
smallest samples are all thin sections.
My point is that every article about this issue shows a photo of a
big rock, and NASA just doesn't issue big rocks to us
researchers. As someone else mentioned, I suspect the actual mass of
missing material is not large.
Randy Korotev
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