Laura Murray Cicco claims she owns a vial of moon dust given to her by Neil Armstrong. She is suing NASA to ensure her ownership of the artifact. (Photo: Provided/U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas) 
 
 A former Cincinnati resident preemptively sued NASA in federal court this month to keep an alleged vial of moon dust given to her by Neil Armstrong. 
 
 The lawsuit filed June 6 is asking the U.S. District Court in Kansas to decide who owns the dust. NASA says private citizen can't own lunar material, but Laura Murray Cicco disagrees. 
 
 The Manchester, Tennessee resident has a small vial, about the size of a lipstick, filled with gray dust along with a note that says "To Laura Ann Murray – Best of luck – Neil Armstrong Apollo 11." 
 
 Cicco said she got the vial when she was 10, and the note was written on the back of one of her father's business cards. 
 
 Court documents state her family lived in Cincinnati during the time the first man on the moon was teaching at the University of Cincinnati. Cicco said her father, Tom Murray, was friends with Armstrong. 
 
 Cicco has had Armstrong's signature verified and had the alleged moon dust tested. Tom Tague with the Bruker Corporation analyzed the sample and reported it "may have originated from lunar regolith," according to the lawsuit. 
 
 Laura Murray Cicco claims she owns a vial of moon dust given to her by Neil Armstrong along with a note. She is suing NASA to ensure her ownership of the artifact. (Photo: Provided/U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas) 
 
 In 2011, NASA conducted a sting against Joann Davis in California. She had a paperweight with lunar material inside she had received as a gift from her husband, and was trying to sell it. The paperweight was seized, and in court, NASA declared "private persons cannot own lunar material." 
 
 It's this assumption Cicco is challenging with the lawsuit. 
 
 "There is no law against private persons owning lunar material. Lunar material is not contraband," the lawsuit states. "She is the rightful and legal owner." 
 
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 A Tennessee woman is suing NASA over a vial of alleged moon dust. 
 
 Laura Cicco said in her lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Kansas, that astronaut Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission, and the first man on the moon, had given the vial to her through her mother when she was 10. An accompanying note from Armstrong says, “To Laura Ann Murray – Best of Luck – Neil Armstrong Apollo 11.” 
 
 “Astronaut Neil Armstrong gifted the vial of lunar dust at issue to Laura Ann Murray, now Laura Murray Cicco, when she was a child, and she is the rightful and legal owner of the vial and its contents,” the lawsuit claims. 
 
 Armstrong and Cicco’s father Tom Murray were friends during a time when they both lived in Cincinnati, according to the lawsuit. Murray served as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and according to the Washington Post, Murray and Armstrong (who was a Naval pilot during the Korean war) were members of a secret pilot society known as the Quiet Birdmen. 
 
 Cicco, who kept the note, found the vial five years ago after her parents both passed away, and she’s determined to keep it. 
 
 The suit is a preemptive one. There is no law that says private citizens cannot own lunar material. However, in 2011, officials staged a sting to retrieve lunar material (which they suspected was stolen) from a 74-year-old woman, Joann Davis. Davis was reportedly given the material — two paperweights, one containing a small lunar rock, and the other containing a piece of the Apollo 11 heat shield — from her late husband, who worked as an engineer on the Apollo 11 mission. Davis was not charged, and she filed a suit against the agency in 2013. 
 
 “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA has taken the position that all lunalogic material is the property of NASA,” the Cicco’s lawsuit claims, citing the Davis case. 
 
 In terms of the material itself, tests performed at the behest of Cicco’s attorney Christopher M. McHugh, by a chemist found that “it would be difficult to rule out lunar origin.” Two tests—x-ray fluorescence (XRF) and x-ray diffraction (XRD)—were performed on the dust to see if it was indeed from the moon. 
 
 One test found that the dust “mineralogy is consistent with the known composition of lunar regolith,” according to the suit. The XRF test, however, showed that it was similar to “average crust of Earth.” 
 
 Fortune contacted NASA for comment and it awaiting a response. In a statement to the Washington Post, the agency said it would not be appropriate to comment on the pending litigation.
– Call it one small step for lunar dust owners. A Tennessee woman is suing NASA preemptively to keep a vial of what she believes is moon dust that was given to the family by Neil Armstrong. Filed in federal court, the suit is an attempt to prevent NASA—which says private citizens can't own lunar rocks or dust, though there is no law against it—from seizing the vial. An expert tested the dust and concluded it "may have originated from lunar regolith," reports Cincinnati.com. Laura Murray Cicco tells the Washington Post that Armstrong gifted her the vial along with a hand-written note decades ago when she was 10. She found the vial five years ago while going through her parents' belongings. Cicco says that Armstrong and her father were both members of a secret society of male pilots and were friends, per Fortune. The note, which has been authenticated, reads: "To Laura Ann Murray, Best of Luck—Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11." Cicco is filing the suit because NASA has in the past seized suspected moon dust. When an elderly widow in California asked NASA to help her find a buyer for two paperweights containing tiny fragments of alleged moon rock that she says were given to her late husband by Armstrong, NASA confronted and aggressively detained and questioned the woman in a sting operation. The woman was not charged, and she sued the agency in 2013 for wrongful seizure, wrongful detention, and other violations of her rights. Cicco's suit is aimed at avoiding that scenario. NASA may view lunar material in private hands as stolen property, but Cicco's attorney disagrees, telling the Post, "Laura shouldn't be afraid that NASA is going to come knocking on her door and barge in and try and take the vial." (In other moon-related news, Buzz Aldrin's moonwalk cost him $33.)