At first glance, when the box was opened, the excitement hardly seemed warranted. On that historic moment on July 26, scientists clad in surgeons' gowns and caps, and carrying gas masks for use in case they should be exposed to any moon dust, crowded together to peer intently through a glass port in the lab's high-vacuum chamber. From the opposite side of the stainless-steel chamber, a technician working through stiff gloves raised the lid of the sample box and laid back the Teflon bag inside.

"What we saw," wryly recalls one observer, "was not much different from a bag of charcoal. The rocks were so covered with dark-gray dust that no one could tell a thing about them."

But later, when the dust was cleaned off and the minerals could be clearly seen, the rocks began to tell their story. It was a story full of surprises. It revealed that no one had been totally right in his ideas of the moon, and it raised more questions than it answered.

Sometime in January, the lunar scientists will gather to report the story of the first moon samples in formal detail. Meanwhile, here are the preliminary highlights, based on interviews with a number of scientists:

—Moon dust holds no threat to life on earth. The samples show no fossil life, no living organisms, and no organic material (except minute traces believed to be almost entirely contamination from the rock boxes or the lunar laboratory).

To test for pathogens, or disease-causing agents, biologists inoculated 200 germ-free mice with finely ground particles of lunar material. These mice had been bred in a completely sterile environment and lacked almost all immunity to disease.

Yet they showed no ill effects whatever. This and other experiments indicate that the rock sample containers were no Pandora's boxes after all, despite early qualms.

—The age of the Sea of Tranquillity appears to be extremely great—almost as old as the moon itself—to the surprise of many geologists. These rocks, dated by the rate at which radioactive potassium has been converted into argon, seem to have crystallized in their present form about three billion years ago. (The moon, like the rest of the solar system, is estimated to have been formed about 4.6 billion years ago.)