Wow, the first man to walk on the moon was kind of a pack rat. I’m kidding of course, but the late astronaut Neil Armstrong was keeping a treasure trove of goodies from the Apollo 11 moon landing in his closet, and it was all recently found by his widow, Carol. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is currently displaying the items for a temporary exhibit and it contains a bunch of forgotten gadgets from the history-making mission.
Among the items are the camera that was mounted to the window of the Eagle lunar module and captured the images of Armstrong on the surface of the moon (some of that footage can be seen in this video), a waist tether, and a few tools for the space suits and ship. What makes it such a find is that the bag that contained the items, a Temporary Stowage Bag or McDivitt Purse, was meant to be attached to the Eagle, but was left behind. It was mentioned during the flight that the astronauts would be taking the bag with them, but since it was lost for so long, it was assumed that the bag was still in the Eagle, which was later destroyed.
But nope, it was right there in Armstrong’s closet this whole time, taking up space (hehe) until Carol Armstrong found it after her husband’s death in 2012. He just never bothered to mention the bag or its contents once he got back to Earth in 1969. A NASA archive site, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, has a page dedicated to just the bag and goes into even more detail about each item and what they were used for. They can currently be seen at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. in an exhibit called Outside the Spacecraft, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first missions that ventured outside the ships that took human beings into space.
Source: CNET