Getting mooned

I thought that since the moon has neither atmosphere nor weather, nothing erodes on its surface. Ergo, the footprints left on the Sea Of Tranquillity by Neil Armstrong in 1969 would be preserved in the lunar regolith forever ― right? Well, not exactly. Having been lassoed by the headline "Footprints and flags on moon won't last forever," I clicked into the MSNBC.com story that challenged my presumptions. It turns out that stuff on the moon does indeed erode. "The moon is constantly bombarded with micrometeorites. These are very, very small particles that impact at very high velocities," explained Mark Robinson, an ASU scientist. And by high velocity, we're talking 33,000 mph. That means astronaut footprints, flags and any other object at the historic landing sites will be pounded to lunar dust and eventually erased. Bummer. I always thought we'd return to moon in a timely fashion and erect a protective memorial around Armstrong's "One Small Step" for mankind. But between budget cutting and NASA's discombobulated priorities, evidence of early human lunar exploration could be long gone by the time we get back to the moon.

But then I arrived at Paragraph Nine of the MSNBC article. There we learn that scientists know that moon rocks "erode at a rate of about 0.04 inches every 1 million years" based on analyzing samples brought back from the Apollo missions. Um, wait. I'm no math whiz, but isn't that kinda negligible? "In human terms, it may seem like forever, but in geologic terms, probably there will be no traces of the Apollo exploration in, let's say, 10 to 100 million years," Dr. Robinson explains with a straight face. Right. This is why they don't let astronomers out of the lab much. 10 to 100 million years?! Let's see, even the lower number is about 8 million years longer than Homo sapiens have existed on Earth. So yes, footprints and flags on the moon won't technically last forever, as MSNBC says. But since even the hapless NASA will get us back there in a century or two, we still have a bit of time to save our early scratchings in the regolith for posterity. Tell me again, MSNBC, what was the point of this article beside page hits? Clearly, we've just been mooned.