Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent
Image source, PA MediaArtist impression issued by European Space Agency of space debris in low Earth orbit
Today’s crash means the Moon now has roughly 3,000 human-made objects, weighing around 190 tonnes combined.
These have built up since the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in September 1959.
NASA’s own tally lists 796 items from its Moon programme alone, mostly left behind by the six Apollo missions; the wider 3,000 figure emerges once you add every other nation and company’s hardware too, from Soviet and Chinese landers to crashed rocket stages like today’s.
Unlike pollution on Earth, this debris poses no threat to an ecosystem, since the Moon has no atmosphere or biosphere to damage.
But scientists are concerned about a few other things.
Image source, Adam BoruckiSpace debris from The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
One is protecting historic sites, such as the Apollo landing zones, from being disturbed or damaged as more missions arrive.
The other is preserving areas valued precisely because they’re untouched, since undisturbed lunar soil holds billions of years of geological history that scientists want to study before it’s scattered by debris.
The more pressing worry, raised by Nasa and SpaceX this week, is collision risk to future missions, as landings and orbital traffic around the Moon are set to rise sharply over the next decade.
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