Human markers on the moon

Notice that white bag on the left

India has taken Lord Shiva to the moon by naming Chandrayan’s landing point after him. Humans have left a lot of other things on the moon too. There is a lot of trash left on the moon by human missions: a whopping 181,000 kg. Quite a bit of that trash consists of what many crewless missions from space-exploring agencies left on the moon over many years. We have left a lot of other stinking waste too: human excreta and urine.

There are 96 bags full of human organic waste abandoned on the surface of the moon, mostly by the various missions of NASA. When the first man to land on the moon, Niel Armstrong, was asked what the white bag in some of his lunar photographs was, he was reluctant to answer. But Charles Duke, the Lunar Module pilot of the 1972 mission, admitted candidly that the astronauts could not carry such waste back to the earth for simple logistics reasons. A whole tank of urine and many bags full of solid waste had to be abandoned on the moon. Many other missions did the same.

Humans have a unique way of leaving their imprints wherever they go.

Scientists are now taking a renewed interest in that human organic waste on the moon. For scientific reasons, of course. Such wastes contain bacteria of many types. How did these bacteria fare on the moon in the last half a century? Science wants to know. The environment on the moon is not at all conducive to survival. There is radiation from the sun which is not blocked by any ozone layer. Lack of water and oxygen as well as other detrimental factors like extreme temperatures [from -170 to +100 degrees Celsius] will make it difficult for any life to go on. What happened to all those bacteria then? Did they survive? Did they flourish?  Or did they perish?

Did the Chandrayan-3 Rover stumble on some golf balls on the moon? They are there, the golf balls. Not because there was some ancient civilization there whose creatures played the game. Alan Shepard of NASA left them there in 1971. He had carried them because he wanted to create a new history by playing the game on the moon. The balls went out of his control, however.

Many astronauts who explored the moon in the past abandoned quite many things on the moon. Maybe, India’s Shiva Shakti will give a new, different power to the moon. After all, India’s Prime Minister is a man with a cosmic vision: he can take our gods to other galaxies too. One cosmos, one family, one god. Jai Hind.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

Previous Post: Why was Donald Shimoda Killed?