And, after all, if a rocket crashes into the moon, it's not a threat to Earth. On his website,, he mused that scientists could learn from it. Gray, the independent astronomer who discovered the rocket's moon-bound trajectory, is rooting for the hit. That's when garbage or errant collisions could become a serious problem, he said.Īnd few are watching. But in 30 years, McDowell envisions moon bases and, thus, more traffic for lunar missions. Right now there isn't a lot of lunar clutter compared to what's circling Earth. His attention is on how such deep space junk could potentially impact humans and tamper with their interests, like science experiments running on the moon. "I don't have a big problem with us leaving stuff on the moon," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Credit: Bettmann / Getty Imagesĭiscarded stuff is an inevitable part of space exploration. Even Israel's failed Beresheet landing three years ago left its mark, spilling dehydrated tardigrades, aka microscopic "water bears," among its crashed cargo.Īstronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands beside an American flag placed on the moon during Apollo 11. Nations that have reached the far-flung destination have left their share of litter and blemishes, whether to lighten the load for the trip home or conduct research. The moon hasn't been pristine for 70 years. That's right: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's poop are historical artifacts. mess, per se, but to keep a log of the items sprawled on the moon so they can be preserved. The purpose wasn't to take accountability for the U.S. Credit: NASA Trash on the moonĪstronaut poop, scoops and tongs, moonquake experiments, a hammer, vomit bags, orbiters, cameras, mirrors, golf balls, cosmic ray detectors, shoes, roving vehicles, and $2 bills: In 2012, NASA published an inventory of about 800 items the agency knows were discarded or installed on the moon. I would love to see more serious scholarly attention to build on how we avoid Wall-E." (In the animated film, the robot Wall-E spends centuries collecting garbage in a dystopian Earth wasteland.)Īpollo-era lunar roving vehicles are among the 800 known items humans have left on the moon, according to NASA. "The closest probably was Wall-E, and frankly, that's pretty dated at this point. "The public kind of gets it, but we haven't yet seen thinking about this in terms of an environmental movement," said Scott Shackelford, an Indiana University professor of business and ethics, working on a framework for addressing space junk. "The public kind of gets it, but we haven't yet seen thinking about this in terms of an environmental movement." But with humanity's growing lunar ambitions, the question is how much moon destruction, contamination, and littering is acceptable to us. Given that it won't be the first time a rocket has slammed into his face - or that junk has scattered on the surface - perhaps he no longer flinches. It's hard to not imagine the "moon man'' wincing from the blow. EST.Ĭhina has denied ownership of the wayward rocket, saying the Chang'e-5 T1 debris burned up in Earth's atmosphere. Though NASA and the European Space Agency weren't monitoring the high-flying space junk - hardly anyone does - they have given credibility to the findings, confirming the crash forecast. Traveling at an estimated 3.3 miles per second, the hunk of metal, now believed to be left over from a 2014 Chinese lunar mission (Gray originally identified it as a SpaceX rocket booster), is expected to make a crater 65-feet long - about the size of a tractor-trailer, and smash into who-knows-how-many pieces. It's expected to make landfall on March 4 and will be the first-known space junk to unintentionally crash into the moon. One hundred and twenty years later, life will painfully imitate art.īill Gray, who tracks objects in near-moon orbits for asteroid hunters in his spare time, recently noticed a four-ton rocket booster on a collision course with the far side of the moon.
#What happend to the moon march 4th movie
If you don't know the French film, you've likely seen its iconic imagery: In the 1902 silent movie A Trip to the Moon, a rocket smashes into the eye of the Man in the Moon.