The new race to save space relics

By Leonard David

updated 8:16 p.m. ET July 25, 2008

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - The moon is sprinkled with historical hardware hurled from Earth that signifies the pioneering steps taken over decades in robotic and human exploration of Earth's celestial next-door neighbor.

But numbers of spacefaring nations, including commercial enterprises, are readying their respective assaults on the moon. That fact has sparked growing concern about safeguarding lunar heritage sites, keeping them free of future "Kilroy was here" graffiti-like abuses.

This issue was aired at the NASA Lunar Science Conference staged here July 20-23 by the new NASA Lunar Science Institute situated at the space agency's Ames Research Center.

Wipe out
"The Apollo sites are, in fact, historic. They are treasures that need to be preserved," said noted author and authority on space exploration Andrew Chaikin. His books include the acclaimed "A Man on the Moon" (Viking, 1994), the impetus for the Tom Hanks HBO television miniseries, 'From the Earth to the Moon.'

"We need to think very, very carefully about how we are going to revisit those sites and not destroy the record of the first human explorations of another world," Chaikin said. "But having said that ... not every footprint on every Apollo site need be preserved."

Chaikin pointed out that there's likely to be very interesting science to be gained from visiting Apollo landing spots, given safe approaches to those locales.

"We need to figure out which of the footprints you don't want to wipe out. That powdery surface is unlike any historical site on the Earth ... and the footprints could be wiped out at a moment's notice with our first revisits," he said.

Bonus prize money
Preserving exploration heritage in the era of private ventures to the moon was flagged by Philip Stooke, associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

Stooke said that commercial lunar efforts — such as the Google Lunar X Prize — have the potential to interact with artifacts from the first era of lunar exploration.

The Google Lunar X Prize is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel some 1,640 feet (500 meters) and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth. Bonus prize money can be won by taking on other mission tasks, including the imaging of human-made artifacts, such as Apollo hardware.

That being the case, Stooke has posed: What rules or guidelines exist, or might be involved in the future, to mediate this interaction? He suggested that guidelines are needed to treat old sites with respect without placing undue restrictions on future activities.

What about other early artifacts such as the former Soviet Union's Luna 9 — the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing and to transmit photographic data to Earth — or that nation's automated Lunakhod rovers? Similarly, what about old NASA Surveyor robot landers that were plopped down on the moon?

Opinions range from complete protection to complete lack of regulation, Stooke observed.

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