Lunar Receiving Laboratory
The Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) is a facility at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Building 37) that was constructed to quarantine astronauts and material brought back from the Moon during the Apollo program to mitigate the risk of back-contamination. After recovery at sea, crews from Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 walked from their helicopter to an isolation van on the deck of an aircraft carrier and were brought to the LRL for quarantine. Samples of rock and regolith that the astronauts collected and brought back were flown directly to the LRL and initially analyzed in glove box vacuum chambers.
The quarantine requirement was dropped beginning with Apollo 15. The LRL is now used for study, distribution and safe storage of the lunar samples. In 1976 a portion of the samples were moved to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas for second-site storage.
References
- Lunar Receiving Laboratory Project History NASA/CR–2004–208938, 2004
- 25 Years of Curating Moon Rocks, Judy Allton
See also
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