After winning a landmark legal battle, Nancy Lee Carlson returned home to the Chicago suburbs on Tuesday, the proud owner of a bag of moon dust. Carlson had purchased the bag in the year 2015 for $995 when it was put up for sale in an online government auction because of a bureaucratic mix-up. But when the Inverness woman sent the artifact to the NASA to test it, the officials there found it contained the unique hallmarks of moon dust, so they have decided not to return it.

That prompted a legal battle which ended with a federal judge ordering the space agency to return what government attorneys described as a priceless national treasure.

"It's what every collector wants," said the Carlson's attorney, Christopher McHugh. "You want to find the thing that's super special."The white bag itself appears as unremarkable, about the size of the dinner plate, with the zipper and a tear in it.

But the white bag is made of beta cloth, a fireproof silica fiber similar to the material used in the space suits. The container was used on the first manned mission to the moon in the year 1969, NASA reported, as the outer decontamination bag to store the first lunar samples collected on the mission by the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

The Government attorneys argued that the bag rightfully belonged to NASA, and Carlson only hoped to make the "windfall profit" from selling it.

NASA issued a statement which read in part as: "This artifact was never meant to be owned by an individual. ... We believe (it) belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred."

Carlson, the corporate attorney and avid collector of space objects, saw the bag at the auction in February 2015, she was the highest bidder. After receiving the bag in the mail, Carlson stored the bag in her bedroom closet. She tried to verify its authenticity by contacting the officials at the Field Museum in Chicago, who referred her to Johnson Space Center in the Houston. She contacted the curator of lunar samples there, and sent him the bag for testing.

There, in the April of last year, the NASA officials verified that the dust in the bag was in fact from the moon and had become embedded into the fabric of the bag. The moon dust is not like its earthly counterpart, in part because there is no water and little atmosphere to erode it, so it is full of pointy microscopic particles which stick to just about anything with which they come in contact.After a yearlong court battle, a federal judge on Friday ordered the NASA officials to hand over the bag. The exchange took place on Monday at the space center in Houston, and Carlson also hired a security firm to take charge of the bag, rather than keeping it in her house.

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Noting the "amazing technical achievements, skill and courage" which NASA workers showed in obtaining the objects, the U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten previously had urged Carlson and the government to amicably resolve the dispute to recognize both their legitimate interests.

McHugh said that Carlson would consider allowing the bag to be displayed publicly, and also she is expected to make an announcement by the end of the week.

It marks the only known case in which a private citizen has won ownership of the lunar object that the government had previously sold, apparently by mistake, the attorneys involved said.

But the moon dust bag is just one of at least hundreds of the lunar objects that have been become part of a pricey, worldwide black market.

In fact, one of the attorneys on the case, Joseph Gutheinz, is the former special investigator for NASA who, in all other cases, has argued that privately owned the lunar objects should be returned to the space agency.He estimates that over a period of time, the U.S. government has given away about 270 moon rocks to the foreign nations and dignitaries as well as about 100 to the states. Many ended up on the black market, and he has helped to recover them for the government through an undercover sting and other investigations. But there are still about 158 lunar objects which are unaccounted for, he said.

The only other legitimate sale of lunar material which Gutheinz knew of was the 1993 year sale of moon rocks from an unmanned Russian space mission, for $442,500.

The case of the moon dust bag comes at the time of renewed interest in the space exploration. President Donald Trump was expected to announce a return to human space missions on Tuesday, and the private company SpaceX announced in this week that it hopes to bring tourists to orbit the moon next year.

Mrudula Duddempudi.