The bag used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to collect the first samples of lunar rock was accidentally sold at a government auction last year. 
 
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 The Apollo 11 Lunar Module ascent stage, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. aboard, is photographed from the Command and Service Modules in lunar orbit in this July, 1969 file photo. 
 
 Nearly 50 years after the first lunar landing, an artifact from the Apollo 11 mission has become the center of a new legal dispute. 
 
 Federal prosecutors are seeking to recover a white sample bag that had been used on the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The bag was collected in a criminal investigation against Max Ary, founder and former director of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, and mistakenly sold at a government auction in 2015. 
 
 Government officials called the bag “a rare artifact, if not a national treasure,” the Associated Press reports. 
 
 On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon. They used the bag in question to collect the first samples of lunar rock. 
 
 In 2005, Mr. Ary was convicted of stealing and selling hundreds of space artifacts, many on loan from NASA to the Cosmosphere. Investigators discovered the lunar bag during a search of Ary’s garage in 2003. 
 
 More than a decade later, the bag was sold at a government auction to Nancy Carlson, an Illinois resident. Carlson purchased the bag for $995 and later shipped it to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for authentication. NASA, who had apparently not been notified of the bag’s sale, withheld the artifact. In June, Carlson sued the agency in an Illinois federal court, seeking the bag’s return. 
 
 Federal prosecutors have asked the federal judge who handled Ary’s case to rescind the sale and refund Carlson. 
 
 Officials say the confusion stems from an internal clerical error, in which two separate lunar bags were given the same inventory identification number. The other was a sample bag from the most recent lunar mission, Apollo 17, launched in 1972. In 2001, Ary auctioned the second bag for over $20,000. It was later recovered by investigators. 
 
 In 2006, Ary was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay over $130,000 in restitution. In 2008, he made an unsuccessful bid to appeal his conviction. Ary was released on good behavior in 2010, having served about 70 percent of his sentence. He has consistently maintained innocence, claiming that he accidentally mixed museum artifacts with items from his private collection. 
 
 This report contains material from the Associated Press. ||||| WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A bag carried to the moon aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft and used for the first sample of lunar material is at the center a legal fight after the government mistakenly sold it during the criminal case against the former director of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. 
 
 The white bag — which was flown to the moon on Apollo 11 in June 1969 and has lunar material embedded in its fabric — is "a rare artifact, if not a national treasure," the government said. 
 
 The dispute is the latest legal twist in the case of Max Ary, the founder and longtime director of the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson who was convicted in November 2005 for stealing and selling museum artifacts. 
 
 At issue in his prosecution were hundreds of missing space artifacts and memorabilia. Some were on loan from NASA to the Cosmosphere. The lunar bag was discovered in 2003 during the execution of a search warrant in a box located in Ary's garage. 
 
 On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office asked a federal judge to set aside the final forfeiture order and rescind the bag's sale, saying that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was not properly notified of its forfeiture because the bag was misidentified. 
 
 The bag was sold at a government auction on Feb. 15, 2015 for $995 to Nancy Carlson in Inverness, Illinois. NASA learned the Apollo 11 bag had been sold without notice or permission when Carlson sent it to NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for authentication. Carlson separately sued NASA in June in a federal court in Illinois, seeking the return of the bag. 
 
 Federal prosecutors want the federal judge in Kansas who handled Ary's criminal case and subsequent forfeiture to rescind the sale and refund Carlson her money. 
 
 Apparently, two lunar bags were confused as one and the same after inventory identification numbers of them were combined on spreadsheets, the government said. 
 
 The other bag was an Apollo 17 lunar sample bag that was flown to the lunar surface aboard the Lunar Module Challenger. That bag was sold by Ary at a 2001 auction for $24,150, and it was later recovered by the government during its investigation. 
 
 Ary, who was president and CEO of the Cosmosphere from 1976 to 2002, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $132,274 in restitution. He has since been released from prison after serving about 70 percent of his sentence. 
 
 He has always maintained his innocence, saying he accidentally mixed museum artifacts with ones he collected and sold privately from his home. ||||| As a child, Nancy Lee Carlson watched in fascination as the astronauts of Apollo 11 bounced across the surface of the moon, collecting rocks to bring back to earth. 
 
 She never dreamed she would come to possess her own piece of the lunar surface, her lawyer said. But after winning a landmark legal battle, Carlson returned home to the Chicago suburbs Tuesday, the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind bag of moon dust. 
 
 Carlson had purchased the bag in 2015 for $995 when it was put up for sale in an online government auction because of a bureaucratic mix-up. But when the Inverness woman sent the artifact to NASA to test it — and officials there found it contained the unique hallmarks of moon dust — they decided they would not return it. 
 
 That prompted a legal battle that ended with a federal judge ordering the space agency to return what government attorneys described as a priceless national treasure. 
 
 "It's what every collector wants," said Carlson's attorney, Christopher McHugh. "You want to find the thing that's super special." 
 
 A priceless bag of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission has been returned to a Chicago-area woman after she won a landmark legal victory against NASA. 
 
 The white bag itself appears unremarkable, about the size of a dinner plate, with a zipper and a tear in it. 
 
 But the bag is made of beta cloth, a fireproof silica fiber similar to the material used in space suits. The container was used on the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, NASA reported, as the outer decontamination bag to store the first lunar samples collected on the mission by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. 
 
 Government attorneys argued that the bag rightfully belonged to NASA, and that Carlson only hoped to make a "windfall profit" from selling it. 
 
 NASA issued a statement that read in part: "This artifact was never meant to be owned by an individual. ... We believe (it) belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred." 
 
 Indeed, how Carlson came to possess the celestial souvenir is a space odyssey in its own right. 
 
 Previously, the government had seized the bag in a criminal case against Max Ary, the former president of a space museum in Kansas. He was convicted in 2006 of theft for selling objects from the museum, court records show. 
 
 While investigating Ary, authorities learned the moon bag had been auctioned off for $24,150 and seized it from its purchaser. But because of a mix-up with another bag that did not contain moon dust, no NASA official at the time was aware of the historical importance of the artifact. The bag containing the lunar dust went to the U.S. Marshals Service, and was put up for auction at forfeiture.gov, to obtain restitution in the criminal case. 
 
 The initial auction asked for a beginning offer of at least $20,000, but nobody bid on it. When Carlson, a corporate attorney and avid collector of space objects, saw the bag at auction again in February 2015, she was the high bidder. 
 
 After receiving the bag in the mail, Carlson stored it in her bedroom closet. She tried to verify its authenticity by contacting officials at the Field Museum in Chicago, who referred her to Johnson Space Center in Houston. She contacted the curator of lunar samples there, and sent him the bag for testing. 
 
 There, in April of last year, NASA officials verified that the dust in the bag was in fact from the moon and had become embedded into the fabric of the bag. Moon dust is not like its earthly counterpart, in part because there is no water and little atmosphere to erode it, so it's full of pointy microscopic particles that stick to just about anything with which they come in contact. 
 
 After a yearlong court battle, a federal judge on Friday ordered NASA officials to hand over the bag. The exchange took place Monday at the space center in Houston, and Carlson hired a security firm to take charge of the bag, rather than keeping it in her house. 
 
 Noting the "amazing technical achievements, skill and courage" that NASA workers showed in obtaining the objects, U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten previously had urged Carlson and the government to amicably resolve the dispute to recognize both their legitimate interests. 
 
 McHugh said Carlson would consider allowing the bag to be displayed publicly, and she is expected to make an announcement by the end of the week. 
 
 It marks the only known case in which a private citizen has won ownership of a lunar object that the government had previously sold, apparently by mistake, attorneys involved said. 
 
 But the moon dust bag is just one of at least hundreds of lunar objects that have been become part of a pricey, worldwide black market. 
 
 In fact, one of the attorneys on the case, Joseph Gutheinz, is a former special investigator for NASA who, in all other cases, has argued that privately owned lunar objects should be returned to the space agency. 
 
 He estimates that over time, the U.S. government has given away about 270 moon rocks to foreign nations and dignitaries as well as about 100 to the states. Many ended up on the black market, and he has helped recover them for the government through an undercover sting and other investigations. But there are still about 158 lunar objects unaccounted for, he said. 
 
 The only other legitimate sale of lunar material that Gutheinz knew of was the 1993 sale of moon rocks from an unmanned Russian space mission, for $442,500. 
 
 The case of the moon dust bag comes at a time of renewed interest in space exploration. President Donald Trump was expected to announce a return to human space missions Tuesday, and the private company SpaceX announced this week that it hopes to bring tourists to orbit the moon next year. 
 
 "Millions of people are intrigued by space around the world," Gutheinz said. "(Carlson) is one of them. She loves space. And she had the gumption not to back down." 
 
 rmccoppin@chicagotribune.com 
 
 Twitter @RobertMcCoppin
– A priceless bag used during the first moon walk was accidentally sold at a government auction, and is now the center of a legal dispute, the AP reports. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin tucked moon rocks into the white sack they took with them during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. After discovering the bag was hawked last year, the government is now scrambling to reverse the sale. The bag is embedded with space material and is "a rare artifact, if not a national treasure," officials say. Although a clerical error was to blame for the sale, the bag caper dates back to the case brought against Max Ary, the ex-director of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, who was convicted in 2005 of stealing and selling museum artifacts. The Apollo 11 bag was among hundreds of items found during a search of his garage. Then the government accidentally sold the bag at auction in 2015. Nancy Carlson, the Illinois woman who bought it for $995, sent it to NASA to confirm it was the real deal. It was—and surprised NASA officials kept it instead of returning it, touching off a legal fight. It turns out the bag was given the same inventory identification number as a similar one used on the final Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Christian Science Monitor reports. (Ary had sold that one in 2001 for $24,150. It was eventually recovered.) Carlson sued in June to have the bag returned to her, but federal prosecutors are asking a judge to rescind the sale. Astronauts called the lunar bags the “purse.” After Armstrong’s death in 2012, his widow found one of them, filled with space-related objects, in a closet.