Extremely rare moon fabric borrowed from China shown in the UK

The first samples of Moon Rock that has been brought to the earth in almost 50 years have arrived in the UK – on loan from China.

The small grains of dust are now locked in a safe in a high security facility in Milton Keynes – we got the first look at them.

Professor Mahesh Anand is the only scientist in the UK that is borrowed this extremely rare material that he describes as “more expensive than gold dust”.

“No one in the world had access to the monsters of China, so this is a great honor and a huge privilege,” he says.

After grinding and zapping the dust with lasers, the team of Prof Anand hopes to answer fundamental questions about what the moon was and about the early years of planet Earth.

Within the grains of fabric, the evidence can be to support the theory of scientists that the moon was made of the rubble thrown away when the earth hit a Mars-Size planet 4.5 billion years ago.

China gathered the rocks on his Chang’e 5 Space Mission in 2020 when it landed in a volcanic area called Mons Rümker.

A robot -like arm that was drilled into the ground to collect 2 kg of material, which was brought back to the earth in a capsule that landed in the inner Mongolia.

It was the first successful moon sampling since a Soviet mission in 1976 and China catapulted in a leading position in the new Space Race.

Now, after a long tradition of global cooperation between space scientists, China has granted seven international researchers samples for the first time to make new discoveries.

The small bottles were handed over to Prof Anand last week during a glamorous ceremony in Beijing, where he met colleagues from Russia, Japan, Pakistan and Europe.

“It was almost like a parallel universe – and China is so far in front of us in terms of their investment in space programs,” he said.

He returned to the UK with the precious charge in the safest place he could think of – his hand luggage.

In his lab at Open University in Milton Keynes we board Sticky Mats to clean our shoes and put on plastic gloves, dresses, hair nets and caps.

The environment in this high security space must be spotless to prevent contamination.

If earthly material mixes with these alien specifications, this could permanently ruin the team of Prof Anand.

We squat on the floor for a row of safes. Prof Anand unlocks one and carefully pulls out a zipper closure with three containers the size of boxes that can retain a chain.

Surely sandwiched in each is a transparent vial with a dust from dark gray at the bottom.

That is the moon fabric.

It looks underwhelming, but it is humiliating to think of his cosmic journey.

And Prof Anand says that they do not need more in total than this 60 mg.

“Here is the small powerful. Believe me, it’s enough to keep us busy for years, because we are specialized in working on the micro,” he adds.

In a laboratory in the hallway, technician Kay Knight will be the first person to actually work on the grains when the bottles are opened.

She has been cutting and grinding pieces of stones for 36 years, but this will be the first time that she has worked on something directly from the moon’s surface.

“I am very excited,” she says, after she has shown us how she cuts meteorites using a diamond sheet.

“But I am nervous – there are not many of the samples and they can’t really get very easy anymore. This is high bet,” she adds.

After she prepares the samples, they enter two more laboratories.

In one we see a machine with a complicated network of countless tubes, valves and threads.

Technician Sasha Verchovskyhas has been building it since the early 1990s. He shows us the small cylinder where the specifications of fabric can be heated to 1400 Celsius. That will help them extract carbon, nitrogen and noble gases.

This is completely unique and is one of the reasons why Prof Anand believes that his lab was chosen to receive the rare samples.

James Malley, a research technician, operates a machine that can find out how much oxygen is included in the specifications of dust.

He shows us a test run of what he will do.

“I’m going to hit that grain on the tray with a laser,” he says, who shows the scene that has been enlarged on a computer screen.

“It is going to start to glow, and you will see it melting in,” he says.

The team has a year to complete their research. By the end, their search for answers will probably destroy the samples.

But China has continued since the Chang’e 5 mission.

In 2024, the launch of Chang’e 6 brought back the first samples from the other side of the moon. It is a deep mysterious place that can have indications of long -term volcanic lava flows.

“I hope this is the start of a long -term cooperation between China and international scientists,” says Prof Anand.

“Many of us have built our career that work on monsters that are returned by Apollo missions, and I think this is a fantastic tradition to follow. I hope that other countries will follow the example,” he adds.

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