When Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell picked up a hefty, football-sized rock near the rim of Cone Crater in February 1971, they had no idea it might be carrying a secret piece of home. This rock, later nicknamed "Big Bertha," weighed almost 20 pounds, making it the third-largest sample returned during the Apollo program, smaller only than Big Muley from Apollo 16 and Great Scott from Apollo 15. After almost five decades, a study titled ‘Terrestrial-like zircon in a clast from an Apollo 14 breccia’ published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters found that a tiny piece within this rock was most likely not formed on the Moon at all.
A football-sized rock with a hidden passenger
