Great Scott (lunar sample)

Great Scott on the Moon's surface before being collected. The object at right is a gnomon, used for scale.

Station 9A planimetric map showing the location of Great Scott at 15555. "X" indicates sample locations, 5-digit numbers are LRL sample numbers, the rectangle is lunar rover (dot indicates TV camera), black spots are large rocks, dashed lines are crater rims or other topographic features, and triangles are panorama stations.

Lunar Sample 15555, better known as "Great Scott", is a large Moon rock discovered and collected on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

The sample

Apollo 15 mission commander David Scott collected Lunar Sample 15555 in the Hadley-Apennine region of the Moon, on the edge of a Moon valley called Hadley Rille at Station 9A. The large sample was soon nicknamed "Great Scott", because of how big it is and the name of the astronaut who discovered it.

The rock is a type of volcanic rock known as basalt and is rich in a green mineral called olivine. It weighs about 9.6 kilograms (21.2 pounds), making it the largest sample brought to Earth from the Apollo 15 mission, and the one that has been studied the most.

The term Great Scott started to be used for the sample as soon as the next mission, Apollo 16, because Charlie Duke used the term just before picking up another Moon sample nicknamed Big Muley. Big Muley is the largest rock (11.7 kg) brought from the Moon; it's the only Moon rock bigger than Great Scott.

Display

Great Scott is currently stored at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, the main facility where NASA trains astronauts and directs missions.

Pieces of it are on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Tellus Science Museum in the state of Georgia, the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex in Spain, the LROC Lunar Exploration Museum at Arizona State University, and the Science Museum in London, England.