The Moon’s surface is strewn with hundreds of man-made items, from spacecraft to bags of urine to colossal plaques. Most are spacecraft, more than 70 vehicles in all dispersed over the lunar surface.
What do the following items have in common?
5 American flags 12 pairs of boots 96 bags of urine, feces, and vomit A photograph of Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke’s family
If you guessed that these are all among the items on the moon, then you are correct.
In total, the moon has more than 400,000 pounds of man-made material, and we humans constantly add to that pile. Humans crash probes into the moon—a tedious method for bringing unmanned missions to a close. And these crashes often leave behind a lot of trash.
But is this trash a problem, or just the cost of doing space travel?
Weighing in is Jerry Linenger, a former NASA astronaut. He was the sole American on board the Russian space station Mir, which survived the worst fire in space exploration history. He’s also the author of “Off The Planet.”
In addition to the items mentions above, here’s a rough list of stuff on the moon, according to The Atlantic.
More than 70 spacecrafts, including rovers, modules, and crashed orbiters TV cameras Film magazines Numerous Hasselbad cameras and accessories Several improvised javelins Various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels Backpacks Insulating blankets Utility towels Used wet wipes Personal hygiene kits Empty packages of space food A feather from Baggin, the Air Force Academy’s mascot falcon, used to conduct Apollo 15’s famous “hammer-feather drop” experiment A small aluminum sculpture, a tribute to the American and Soviet “fallen astronauts” who died in the space race — left by the crew of Apollo 15 A patch from the never-launched Apollo 1 mission, which ended prematurely when flames engulfed the command module during a 1967 training exercise, killing three U.S. astronauts A small silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from 73 world leaders, and left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 11 A silver pin, left by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean A medal honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin A cast golden olive branch left by the crew of Apollo 11.
It's challenging to say, but the trash on the moon likely weighs upward of 400,000 lbs. (181,000 kilograms) on Earth. This weight is taken from Wikipedia, but it sounds about right considering that quite a few heavy artifacts, such as five moon rangers, are still there, said William Barry, NASA chief historian. [Why Doesn't the Moon Have a Name?]
Much of this moon litter was left by NASA astronauts who landed on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972 during the Apollo program. The other rubbish comes from crewless missions from space-exploring agencies, including those from the United States, Russia, Japan, India and Europe, Barry said.
Many of the older pieces are lunar probes that were sent to the moon to learn about it, such as whether spaceships could land on its surface. In the 1960s, some scientists thought that the moon might have a quicksand-like exterior because so many space rocks had pummeled and pulverized it over the years. These robotic probes, which stayed on the moon after their missions ended, showed that this idea was wrong, and that human-made gear could land on the moon's surface, Barry said.
The moon is also home to lunar orbiters that mapped its terrain before they crashed into its surface, adding to the garbage heap.
The moon has a lot of junk on it, including a gold olive branch, a flag kit, several lunar orbiters, and a hammer and a falcon feather — the components of a 1971 experiment used to demonstrate that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass.
There are dozens more pieces of lunar debris. But how much garbage, exactly, have humans left or sent to the moon?
It's challenging to say, but the trash on the moon likely weighs upward of 400,000 lbs. (181,000 kilograms) on Earth. This weight is taken from Wikipedia, but it sounds about right considering that quite a few heavy artifacts, such as five moon rangers, are still there, said William Barry, NASA chief historian. [Why Doesn't the Moon Have a Name?]
Much of this moon litter was left by NASA astronauts who landed on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972 during the Apollo program. The other rubbish comes from crewless missions from space-exploring agencies, including those from the United States, Russia, Japan, India and Europe, Barry said.
Many of the older pieces are lunar probes that were sent to the moon to learn about it, such as whether spaceships could land on its surface. In the 1960s, some scientists thought that the moon might have a quicksand-like exterior because so many space rocks had pummeled and pulverized it over the years. These robotic probes, which stayed on the moon after their missions ended, showed that this idea was wrong, and that human-made gear could land on the moon's surface, Barry said.
The moon is also home to lunar orbiters that mapped its terrain before they crashed into its surface, adding to the garbage heap. The falcon feather and hammer are still on the moon. The falcon feather and hammer are still on the moon. Credit: NASA
Other gear in the growing landfill has helped scientists learn about the moon. For instance, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was sent to the moon to study the hydrogen there and to confirm the existence of water. Its mission was successful, and LCROSS is still hanging out on the moon's surface, Barry said.
As for the objects left by the Apollo astronauts, there wasn't a lot of thought put into bringing back unneeded equipment, Barry said. Moreover, doing so would have used up precious resources, such as fuel, he added.
"On any engineering project, like landing on the moon, you design the mission to do what you need it to do and not a whole lot more," Barry told Live Science. "The real concern was: Can we get the crew safely to the moon, can they get the samples they need and can we get them back in one piece?"
But, as the saying goes — one person's trash is another's treasure. Although many people might call the odds and ends humans have left on the moon "garbage" (what else would you call a used urine-collection assembly?), NASA takes a kinder view.
Researchers can study these objects to see how their materials weathered the radiation and vacuum of space over time, Barry said. Moreover, some of the objects on the moon are still being used, including a laser-range reflector left by the Apollo 11 crew. [What Does the Top of the Moon Look Like?]
Researchers on Earth can ping this reflector with lasers, which allows them to measure the distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA. These experiments helped scientists realize that the moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) a year, NASA reported.
The so-called trash left on the moon also has archaeological merit, Barry said. Future lunar visitors may want to view the old Apollo sites and see gear from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and other countries, Barry said.
You can find a full list of the abandoned objects on the moon here. However, the list hasn't been updated since 2012, Barry noted, and is missing more recent objects, such as Ebb and Flow, two NASA lunar probes that helped researchers analyze the moon's gravitational field.
WOW, we litter not only in our oceans and all over the place on Earth, but even in our trips to the Moon we go and dispose of all our trashy way of living.
Finally, somebody’s doing something about Earth’s orbital trash problem.
A European satellite designed to test different methods of “active debris removal” is scheduled to launch to the space station on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship on April 2. It will be the first in-space test of technologies to collect and remove large pieces of orbital junk, a growing threat that has long concerned the world’s space agencies. A Japanese experiment in space trash removal, called KITE, had to be scrapped last year when the spacecraft’s tether failed to deploy.
The $18.5 million RemoveDEBRIS satellite due to launch on Monday was funded half by the European Commission, and half by a consortium of 10 companies, including the spacecraft’s builder, Surrey Satellite Technology in England, and Airbus, which contributed the net and harpoon mechanisms to be evaluated in the tests.
If the schedule holds, the 220-pound RemoveDEBRIS satellite will be pushed out of the station’s Japanese module airlock in late May to begin a series of experiments. About the size of a dorm room refrigerator, it will be the largest satellite ever launched from the station.
In the first test, a CubeSat released from the main spacecraft will maneuver to a distance of more than 20 feet, where it will unfurl a balloon (to provide a bigger target). A net similar to the kind used in commercial fishing will then be deployed from the main spacecraft to capture the CubeSat. Atmospheric drag should cause the netted CubeSat to burn up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks, according to Guglielmo Aglietti, Director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, and the principal investigator for RemoveDEBRIS.
For the second test, another CubeSat will be released to fly at a distance from the main spacecraft, where a camera and LIDAR will observe it to assess how well future trash-collecting satellites could judge the position and speed of a piece of debris.
Then, to test a different method of snaring space trash, a standoff target—made of representative satellite materials—will be shot with a harpoon connected to a tether. Finally, a large sail will be unfurled from the main satellite to increase its atmospheric drag and cause it to burn up during re-entry, about a year and a half later. The project investigators expect to have all their tests wrapped up by the end of this year, says Aglietti.
If everything works as hoped, the technologies tested on RemoveDEBRIS will be incorporated into planning for the e.deborbit mission planned for launch around 2024. That project, expected to cost some $400 million, aims to capture and de-orbit the eight-ton Envisat spacecraft. RemoveDEBRIS is just a first step toward the much more ambitious goal of removing the largest dead satellites from orbit. Those are the biggest threats, since a hit from some other bit of speeding space junk could turn any of them into thousands of new pieces of debris. And with 7,500 tons of garbage already circling the Earth, that’s an accident global space managers would dearly like to prevent.
I love that idea, but they are finding out a lot of things about these famous black holes, may be they are not so black and may be they are not so hole-full.
