Materials

"I’ve worked with many valuable materials in my career. Precious metals like gold and platinum, rare engineered nanomaterials, and fragile gemstones nearly as old as the Earth itself. But the unassuming jars of fine gray-brown powder I found myself holding last year left them all in the dust, so to speak.

I think I probably kicked up some dust, too, when my colleague Ed Garboczi called to ask if I wanted to help him make some measurements of particles that the Apollo 11 and 14 astronauts had collected during their lunar landings.

After all, when you get a call like that, you don’t walk, you run."

– An excerpt from a Taking Measure blog post from NIST researcher Ann Chiaramonti Debay, who writes about her work to measure the 3-D shape and size distribution of moon dust from the Apollo 11 and 14 missions