A

David

Darling

Lunar Receiving Laboratory

Lunar Receiving Laboratory

The Lunar Receiving Laboratory was an elaborate facility built at NASA's Johnson Space Center to quarantine Apollo astronauts, spacecraft, and lunar samples following their return to Earth from the Moon. Concern about the possibility of back-contamination mandated that astronauts be kept in isolation for at least three weeks and that preliminary examination of samples be carried out behind absolute biological barriers. The quarantine requirement was dropped after the Apollo 14 mission.