The Touchable Moon Rock
Formed about 3.8 billion years ago; collected 1972
Set into a pedestal near the entrance is a small triangular slice of dark grey stone, polished smooth by millions of fingers, and a sign that invites you to touch it. It is a piece of the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt picked up the parent rock in December 1972 in the Taurus-Littrow valley during Apollo 17, the last crewed mission to the Moon, and it is one of only a handful of lunar samples in the world that anyone is allowed to handle. Most of the three hundred and eighty two kilograms that Apollo brought home are locked in nitrogen filled cabinets in Houston.
The rock is a basalt, a volcanic stone formed when lava flooded the low basins of the Moon nearly four billion years ago, and it is very like the basalts of Hawaii or Iceland except that it has never been touched by water or air. Look at the fine grain and the tiny crystals that glint under the light; the polished surface was cut in a laboratory so that the interior could be studied before this slice was set aside for the public. It feels cool and slightly waxy, like any hard stone, which is the point. The Moon, it turns out, is made of ordinary rock, and that ordinariness is what tells geologists how it and the Earth were formed.
The touchable rock has been in the Milestones hall since the building opened in 1976 and returned to the renewed hall in July 2025. Children queue for it, but watch the adults too; astronauts have said that the visitors who touch it most reverently are the older ones who remember watching the landings. There is a second touchable Moon rock at the Udvar-Hazy Center. This is the smaller and the more worn, and the wear is the record of half a century of hands.
Did You Know? The slice is one of the very few Moon samples anyone can touch; the rest of the Apollo collection is kept sealed in nitrogen in Houston.
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