The biggest recent breach of the COSPAR protocols was in 2019 when the privately funded Israeli lunar lander Beresheet crashed on the Moon, carrying DNA samples and thousands of tardigrades. The scientific argument is that we want to study and understand the natural conditions on each other body, so we should not risk compromising or destroying them by wanton contamination. The ethical argument is that it would not be right to put at risk any ecosystem that may exist on another body by introducing organisms from Earth that might thrive there. The protocols are in place for reasons both ethical and scientific. Most nations have signed up to planetary protection protocols that seek to minimise the risk of biological contamination from Earth to another body (and also from another body back to Earth). What we should worry about is contaminating the Moon with living microbes, or molecules that could in the future be mistaken as evidence of former life on the Moon.
It already has something like half a billion craters that are ten metres or more in diameter. So I’m not bothered by one more crater being made on the Moon. NASA/GSFC/Arizona State UniversityĪ precisely targeted, deliberate crash was also achieved in 2009 when Nasa’s LCROSS mission sent a projectile into a permanently shadowed polar crater – making a smaller crater on its icy floor and throwing up a plume that proved to contain the hoped for water vapour. The Open University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.ģ0 metre wide crater on the Moon from the Apollo 13 Saturn IVB upper stage.
ON EARTH I AM DEAD I LIVE ON THE MOON FREE
He is Educator on the Open University's free learning Badged Open Course (BOC) on Moons and its equivalent FutureLearn Moons MOOC, and chair of the Open University's level 2 course on Planetary Science and the Search for Life. He is author of Planet Mercury - from Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2015), Moons: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Planets: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has received funding from the UK Space Agency and the Science & Technology Facilities Council for work related to Mercury and BepiColombo, and from the European Commission under its Horizon 2020 programme for work on planetary geological mapping (776276 Planmap). He is co-leader of the European Space Agency's Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group, and a Co-Investigator on MIXS (Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer) that is now on its way to Mercury on board the European Space Agency's Mercury orbiter BepiColombo. Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open Universityĭavid Rothery is Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University.
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