How long would a footprint stay visible on the surface of the moon?

reply to post by wewillnotcomply666


well Hubble can see to infinity -- and this is what it saw on the moon at Apollo 15 landing site... lets take a look... *I find the different descriptions of the astronauts blasting off from the surface most enlightning*

How long would a footprint stay visible!

There isnt any wind to move the Luna regolith, but other geological activities such as moon quakes caused by the gravitational movement of the moon around earth and the changes in temp could cause slight movement in the regolith which could over time destroy the footprints..

science.nasa.gov...

There are at least four different kinds of moonquakes: (1) deep moonquakes about 700 km below the surface, probably caused by tides; (2) vibrations from the impact of meteorites; (3) thermal quakes caused by the expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night; and (4) shallow moonquakes only 20 or 30 kilometers below the surface.

The first three were generally mild and harmless. Shallow moonquakes on the other hand were doozies. Between 1972 and 1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few "registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale," says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster.

reply to post by 1BornPatriot

Those images are not from Hubble. They are from the LROC.
Hubble cannot resolve objects of that size on the surface of the Moon.

reply to post by 1BornPatriot


That's an old video, and theose are not images from Hubble. The Hubble telescope is great for seeing big, faint galaxies a long way away, but it does not have the resolution to see small objects on the bright surface of the Moon. Here's why.

The pix in the video are some early ones from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera (LROC) while it was still in the commisioning phase of its mission. Much better images have been returned in the three years since.

Apollo 11 (Full image in browse & zoom format)
Apollo 12 (Full image in browse & zoom format)
Apollo 15 (Full image in browse & zoom format)
Apollo 16 (Full image in browse & zoom format)

Sorry I don't have the Apollo 14 or 17 images bookmarked, but you can find them at the Arizona State University's LROC website.

"Oh say, does our star-spangled banner yet wave?"

Back to the flag issue...

A lot of people (including myself) were reasonably sure that all of the flags would have disintegrated by now. Then last March the LROC team released the highest-resolution yet image of the Apollo 12 landing site, and it seems to show the shadow of the flag!



Similar resolution pisc of the other sites have not show this shadow (although they do show disturbed soil from the astronauts' footwork as they set-up the flags). I'm guessing here, but what probably made the difference was that the Apollo 12 flag did not deploy as it was intended. The horizontal arm that was supposed to hold the flag straight-out like it did on the other missions failed to lock and left Old Glory drooping.

Here is a picture of the drooping flag:


Hi-res version

As you can see, it is in the exact position relative to the high-gain antenna (HGA) and the LM's landing pads to cast the shadow seen in the upper image. It may be that the fully-deployed flags bore the full brunt of the solar UV over the decades and disintegrated, whereas the drooping flag protected enough of the material in its folds to survive.



P.S. Just for fun, here is browsable version of the whole image from which the above annotated blow-up was made. See how long it takes you to find Intrepid, Surveyor and the trails left by Al Bean & Pete Conrad's footprints.