It seems that wherever Man places his foot he takes
rubbish and contagion with him.
The Moon is now littered with bits of junk that we have
managed to crash into it or leave behind. The first spacecraft to reach the
surface of the Moon was the Russian Luna 2 which crash-landed there in 1959.
This was followed by the American Ranger 7 in 1964, bits of which are still
there, presumably scattered over a considerable area. Nothing changes on the
Moon, not even a footprint.
However, the most worrying example of our carelessness must
be the Surveyor 3 probe of 1967. This landed softly and began taking soil
samples. It was recovered by the crew of Apollo 12 in 1970, when it was found
that bacteria that had been carried by the original probe were still alive
three years later.
Since then, every effort has been made to ensure that
anything that reaches the Moon or any other extra-terrestrial world is
thoroughly sterilized before it leaves Planet Earth.
However, that still leaves all the junk from the manned and
unmanned missions to the Moon (and Mars). Scientific advances are all very
well, but do we really have the right to destroy the pristine perfection of the
rest of the Solar System?
© John Welford
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