MADISON, Wis.-
Looking for a ball of gold thread leftover from a university space experiment? Apparently nobody else is either.
A Thursday night deadline passed with nobody bidding the minimum $8,500 for the shiny glob of pure gold leftover from equipment University of Wisconsin scientists made that traveled into space in 2005.
The school’s Space Science and Engineering Center is auctioning off 12.5 troy ounces of 99.999 percent pure gold on a Web site where the university’s surplus property–everything from dorm refrigerators to computers–is sold to the highest bidder.
Mark Mulligan, a project manager at the space center, said the $8,500 asking price, which reflects the going rate for gold, was probably too high. He said he would lower the price and put the gold back up for bid early next week.
Mulligan said he’s convinced the gold will eventually sell. A handful of people inquired but were scared away by the price, he said.
“We just got to get the pricing right,” Mulligan said. “It is gold. You can do with it what you would like.”
University scientists bought the spool of gold thread to use in making a refrigerator that kept instruments on satellites on two Japanese-American rockets cool. A first rocket launched crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2000, but a second in 2005 was successful and the equipment worked, Mulligan said.
