Apollo weigh bags

[turbonium]

The below link describes the weigh bags used during the early Apollo missions. The material is described as "teflon film", but the manufacturer is "Uncertain; may have been Union Carbide".

Teflon is a brand name of DuPont - if it is a teflon film, the material had to have been produced by DuPont. I guess they made a mistake ..

Are there any specs for the weigh / sample bags, such as type and thickness of polymer, etc.?

www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/tools/tools69.jpg

[PhantomWolf]

I guess they made a mistake ..

I think you are reading a little too much into it there. DuPont may have made the material the plastic bags (note there are cloth ones too) were made from, but that doesn't mean they made the actual bags themselves, and that is what the listed manufacturer is refering too.

[turbonium]

Sorry to bump the thread, but does anyone know if there is any technical data on the sampling bags?

[JayUtah]

Haven't found any that sheds any light on this specific question. But if it's like what we do, the materials indeed are made by one company and then fabricated into useful things by another company. So it's certain possible for the bags to have been made by Union Carbide from material that UC purchased in bulk from DuPont. In fact, it's more than possible; it's likely. But the UC attribution is a guess, more than likely based on the notion that UC made a lot of the other sampling equipment. If you didn't know and had to guess, UC is a good guess.

[Tanalia]

I haven't been able to find a spec online yet.

From the Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, much of the print documentation is stored at the National Archives-Southwest Region, at Fort Worth, Texas

One sample entry from the Preliminary Inventory [MS Word document] linked above:

E.181C30. PROJECT FILES ON EQUIPMENT FOR APOLLO SURFACE EXPERIMENTS. 1966-1972. 2 ft.
Arranged by type of equipment.
Correspondence, reports, hand written notes, design reviews, familiarization manuals, engineering status reports, specifications, testing and qualification reports, schedules, drawings, and related material pertaining to the design, construction, testing, and operation of equipment to be used primarily for the return of lunar samples. There are records relating to Sample Return Containers (SRC), hand tools, core tubes, sample bags, spring scales, gas analysis sample containers, drill stems, and weigh bags. Much of the correspondence is with the Y-12 Plant of the Union Carbide Corporation, Nuclear Division at Oak Ridge, Tennessee that relates to sample return containers. There are numerous color and black and white photographs of equipment as it was shipped from the plant and received at the Kennedy Space Center. There are some lists of equipment that provide Serial Numbers or Part Numbers. (Old acc#74A798)
A-30-10-5