Recently, NASA released some Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of some of the Apollo moon landing sites. While this would seem to be the final nail in the coffin of the "we never went to the moon" conspiracy theory, they raise another question.
NASA is expressing interest in protecting the Apollo landing sites from contamination from future lunar landers. The motive is as much scientific as it is cultural and historical. According to an article by Chris Bergen at NASA Space Flight, there is concern that future lunar landers, such as are being developed for the Google Lunar X Prize will damage not only the footprints and treads left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, but the hardware.
Nevertheless there is some interest in revisiting some of the Apollo sites to ascertain how four decades of micrometeorite bombardment and exposure to lunar weathering have affected the descent stages and other hardware left behind. How to do this and not damage the landing sites is a vexing question.
Protocols will no doubt be developed to allow for the traversing of lunar rovers on or at least near the landing sites. However there is a longer view question that has to be answered, especially as humans sooner or later begin to return to the moon.
The Apollo landing sites are historical and cultural areas, where history was literally imprinted on the soil by the footsteps of astronaut explorers and the tread tracks of lunar rovers. When people start living and working on the moon, same care has to be made to keep from contaminating the sites while at the same time eventually facilitating the desire of people on the moon to visit them.
The desire to preserve the sites down to the very footprints make preserving them a more daunting task than the equivalent, say a famous battlefield, on Earth. The disturbance caused by future lunar explorers, kicking up dust, might damage the sites irreversibly.
One idea might be to set up barriers around the landing sites, beyond which future lunar visitors will not be able to traverse. No doubt with careful mapping and the deployment of walkways that avoid the footprints and tread marks, future lunar tourists will be able to enter the sites, to a certain extent, and stand near where the first explorers of the moon stood so many decades before.
That's not an immediate problem, of course. The United States is still wrestling over what sort of space exploration program it should have or whether it should have one at all. But China, India, and perhaps other countries are interested in eventually sending their astronauts to the moon. The question thus arises, if the personnel of other countries are on the moon and Americans are not, will the United States have any say in how the Apollo landing sites are treated?
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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An artist's impression of the Rosetta orbiter deploying the Philae lander to comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko. After an extensive mapping phase by the orbiter in AugustSeptember 2014, a landing site will be selected for Philae to conduct in situ measurements in November 2014.ESAC. Carreau/ATG medialab