Meet the scientist who went to the moon without a spaceship

Moon rocks still awe, and scientists hope to get their hands on more.


Outer space
Outer space

Darby Dyar says that as a kid, whenever Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, she and her classmates would get ushered into the school library to watch it on TV.

She remembers seeing the space capsules bobbing in the ocean as the astronauts emerged.

Dyar is one of the lucky scientists picked to do experiments on this pristine sample. She's spent her whole career studying the moon rocks she first saw on television as a child, although way back then she never would have guessed it.

Nearly a half-ton of moon rocks were collected by the six Apollo missions to the lunar surface. And as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first landing mission approaches, NASA has decided to open up a still-sealed, never-studied moon rock sample that has been carefully saved for decades, waiting for technology to advance.