Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to That mission was on "From the Earth to the Moon" last night.

Online article from Archaeology magazine talks about preserving space objects and areas

From their November/December, 2004 issue here:

http://www.archaeology.org/0411/etc/space.html

To quote:

In 1999, a company called Lunacorp proposed a robotic lunar rover mission beginning at the site of Tranquility Base and rumbling across the Moon from one archaeological site to another, from the wreck of the Ranger 8 probe and a Surveyor spacecraft to Apollo 17's landing site and a lost Soviet Lunakhod rover. The mission, which would leave more than 600 miles of tread marks at some of the most famous sites from the history of exploration, was promoted as a form of theme-park entertainment. In addition to the threat from profit-seeking corporations, scholars cite other potentially destructive forces such as wanton souvenir hunting as well as uncontrolled or unmonitored scientific sampling, like that which has occurred in explorations of remote polar regions.

According to the vaguely worded United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, what it terms "space junk" remains the property of the country that sent the craft or probe into space. But the treaty doesn't explicitly address protection of sites like Tranquility Base, and equating the remains of human exploration of the heavens with "space junk" leaves them vulnerable to scavengers. Another problem arises through other treaties that proclaim that land in space cannot be owned by any country or individual. This presents some interesting dilemmas for the aspiring manager of extraterrestrial cultural resources. If the U.S owns the archaeological remains of Apollo 11 but not the ground underneath it, how to protect the former without disturbing the latter? Does America own Neil Armstrong's famous first footprints on the Moon but not the lunar dust in which they were recorded? Surely those footprints are as important in the story of human development as those left by hominids at Laetoli, Tanzania. But unlike the Laetoli prints, which have survived for 3.5 million years encased in cementlike ash, those at Tranquility Base could be swept away with a casual brush of a space tourist's hand.

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