She bought this bag of ‘moon dust’ online for US$995. It’s real, it’s priceless, and now she gets to keep it

A priceless bag of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission has been returned to a Chicago-area woman after she won a landmark legal victory against Nasa.

Nasa officials handed over the lunar dust bag — the only known one of its kind — at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston Monday under court order.

It marks the only known case in which a private citizen has won ownership of a lunar object that the government had previously sold, apparently by mistake, attorneys involved said.

“It’s what every collector wants. You want to find the thing that’s super special,” attorney Christopher McHugh said of the bag, which has been called priceless and a national treasure.

McHugh represents Nancy Lee Carlson of suburban Inverness, Illinois, who he said bought the moon bag from a government auction in 2015 for US$995.

Having been inspired by broadcasts of lunar landings while she was growing up, Carlson is an avid collector of space objects, McHugh said. Carlson, a corporate attorney, stored the lunar bag in a box in her closet for safe keeping.