Hunting Moon Rocks in your Backyard!

YOU don't have to visit the moon to hold a chunk of it in your hand. Every day around 160 tonnes of rubble from space rains down on Earth, and some of it comes from the moon.

All you need to find a piece of moon rock is keen eyesight, patience and an expanse of ice or desert against which a dark little chunk of our neighbour will stand out.

French collector Luc Labenne, who has been scouring deserts for meteorites since 1997.

Meteorite hunters like Labenne follow an approach pioneered in the 1930s by the American collector Harvey Nininger, working on the Great Plains that stretch west from the Mississippi river to the Rocky mountains. Nininger taught local people to seek out black stones on the pale ground, and thanks to their efforts he bagged more than 200 meteorites over three decades.

Another rich source was identified in 1969 by the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition, which found meteorites on a blue ice field near the Yamato mountains in East Antarctica. Other deserts became a focus of interest in the early 1990s, including the one that yielded our moon rock.

Lunar meteorites are exceedingly rare: only around 60 have been identified. And they don't just interest collectors. Space scientists are also keen to get hold of them, because they hold clues to what the rock is like on parts of the moon beyond the areas explored by the Apollo and robotic landers.