Spain lunar sample displays
commemorative plaques of lunar specimens given to Spain by the United States
The Spain lunar sample displays are two commemorative plaques consisting of tiny fragments of Moon specimens brought back with the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 lunar missions. These plaques were given to the people of Spain by United States President Richard Nixon as goodwill gifts.
Description
Apollo 11
At the request of Nixon, NASA had about 250 presentation plaques made following Apollo 11 in 1969. Each included about four rice-sized particles of Moon dust from the mission totaling about 50 mg. The Apollo 11 lunar sample display has an acrylic plastic button containing the Moon dust mounted with the recipient's country or state flag that had been to the Moon and back. All 135 countries received the display, as did the 50 states of the United States and the U.S. provinces and the United Nations.
The plaques were given as gifts by Nixon in 1970.
Apollo 17
The sample Moon rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission was later named lunar basalt 70017, and dubbed the Goodwill rock. Pieces of the rock weighing about 1.14 grams were placed inside a piece of acrylic lucite, and mounted, along with a flag of the country which would receive it, that had flown on Apollo 17.
In 1973 Nixon had the plaques sent to 135 countries, and to the United States with its territories, as a goodwill gesture.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Spain lunar sample displays” as commemorative plaques of lunar specimens given to Spain by the United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7572916. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1970 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spain lunar sample displays” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.