Could NASA's Moon Base Destroy Evidence of Life's Origins on Earth?
Could the price of this be the destruction of valuable scientific evidence?Credit: NASA
It may sound counterintuitive, but it's actually fairly common in science: The act of investigating something can easily hinder our ability to do so again in the future.
Take the Moon, for example. New research from the European Space Agency and the Belgian university KU Leuven shows that the exhaust released during spacecraft landings could contain and distribute methane across the Moon's surface, contaminating samples from pole to pole.
The study conducted a simulation based on the ESA's Argonaut missions, which are scheduled to begin launching in 2031, using models of exhaust migration on the Moon to see how particles would move and accumulate. The researchers found that there would be a "cold trap" effect in so-called Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) that could preferentially capture these compounds. Amazingly, that's true across the entire Moon, meaning that even...
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