Lunar Receiving Laboratory

The Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) was a facility at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Building 37) that was constructed to quarantine astronauts and material brought back from the Moon during the Apollo program to reduce the risk of back-contamination.

Samples of rock and regolith that the astronauts collected and brought back were flown directly to the LRL and initially analyzed in glovebox vacuum chambers.

In 1976, some of the samples were moved to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for second-site storage.

[3] The Lunar Receiving Laboratory building was later occupied by NASA's Life Sciences division, contained biomedical and environment labs, and was used for experiments involving human adaptation to microgravity.

[4] In September 2019, NASA announced that the Lunar Receiving Laboratory had not been used for two years and would be demolished.

The Lunar Receiving Laboratory shortly after it was built.
First samples from the Moon being delivered to LRL in 1969