President Joe Biden made a decorating choice that has the space community abuzz: There's a moon rock in the Oval Office.
The Washington Post got a look inside Biden's new digs. And one sentence in the article -- "a moon rock set on a bookshelf that is intended to remind Americans of the ambition and accomplishments of earlier generations" -- has inspired many happy Tweets.
"Thank you to @POTUS for putting a @NASA moon rock in the Oval Office - look at what we can do together as a country when we are united," Ellen Stofan, the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, said on Twitter. Stofan served as NASA's chief scientist from 2013 to 2016, and she led Biden's transition team for NASA.
Here the bookshelf next to the Benjamin Franklin painting in the @POTUS oval office that has the moon rock https://t.co/zGqvDEQwNO pic.twitter.com/22rFkXDHvq
— A.C. Charania (@ac_charania) January 21, 2021
A.C. Charania, civil space sales director for Blue Origin, set to work finding the rock's origin.
Collaborating with others, he initially thought the rock was, perhaps, an Apollo 11 vesicular basalt that was previously presented to President Bill Clinton by the Apollo 11 Crew. But NASA provided clarity on Thursday. The rock is Lunar Sample 76015,143 chipped from the moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the last time NASA sent astronauts to the lunar surface.
The 332 gram piece was collected in 1972. It is a 3.9-billion-year-old sample formed during the last large impact event on the nearside of the moon.
"In symbolic recognition of earlier generations’ ambitions and accomplishments, and support for America’s current moon to Mars exploration approach, a moon rock now sits in the Oval Office of the White House," NASA said in its news release.
Meenakshi Wadhwa, director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration, can't wait until a Mars rock is returned to Earth to be placed alongside the moon rock (NASA's Perseverance rover is set to collect samples from Mars, and a future mission could return these samples). Photographer Joshua Conti says he's "feeling fairly confident that we’re still headed to the stars."
"I am loving how excited my timeline is that there's a Moon rock in the Oval Office," said planetary science Ph.D. student Alexander Kling.
And the moon rock wasn't the only space news to come from Biden's inauguration. He also named Steve Jurczyk as NASA's acting administrator. Jurczyk was previously NASA’s associate administrator, the agency's highest-ranking civil servant. He will hold the acting administrator title until Biden names his replacement, who many speculate could be NASA's first female administrator.
Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine resigned on Wednesday. In a heartfelt video, where Bridenstine was on the verge of tears, he said it was the job of a lifetime.
He also called for unity and for support of NASA's new leadership team.
"If we eliminate divisions and we can get the bipartisan, apolitical consensus with commercial partners and international partners," Bridenstine said, "I think it sets us up in a great position to move forward in a meaningful way that crosses not just multiple administrations but multi-decades and in fact multi-generations.”
The agency's future priorities remain a question mark, as Biden has said little about his vision for NASA and for space more broadly. But the little moon rock gave hope to many seeking a vigorous pursuit of space exploration.
This article has been updated with NASA's description of the moon rock.
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