ECOLOGY - NASA scrutinizes the tracks left by its astronauts on the Moon
NASA never ceases to mourn its past glory days, since the US government cut the budgets of its space agency for manned flights. The Agency published on its website on Tuesday photographs of the Moon - remarkable precision - clearly showing the traces left by its astronauts through the 1960s and 1970s - and the material they abandoned in the process. We see in particular the tire tracks of a "Moon buggy" which has been parked there since 1967: http://youtu.be/LIui93E8kkE?hd=1
The BBC peels through these images, recorded by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite, which has been circling the Moon since 2009. The satellite, which has already taken hundreds of thousands of pictures, was supposed to serve as a precursor to new human missions on the moon. But last year, the Agency saw its project, named "Constellation", slashed for lack of budget.
Ecologically speaking, the scientific boss of this telephoto exploration mission, Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, recalls that the waste left on the Moon by NASA is, like everything in this world, biodegradable : "In human years, he told the BBC, it may seem like infinite time, but in geological terms, there will probably be no more traces of Apollo missions in about 10 to 100 million years ago."
http://bigbrowser.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/ ... ur-la-lune
Ah! Attention scoop! Life exists on the moon!
