The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) probe has obtained the most accurate images seen from space to date of the places where the Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 spacecraft landed . The photographs show the footprints left by the astronauts on their exploration walks, as well as the marks of the moon cars they used. "We can retrace the footsteps of the astronauts with great clarity and see exactly where they took the samples," explains Noah Petro, a lunar geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The probe has already announced via Twitter its intention to photograph the Apollo spacecraft landing sites. "I will go down from my usual height of 50 kilometers to 20 kilometers to photograph the landing sites of the Apollo spacecraft. This way I will get the images 4 times sharper than the best of those I did previously," the probe announced on the microblogging platform . LRO has already photographed the landing sites of some Apollo spacecraft in July 2009 and 2010.
All those traces of the human presence on the Moon will disappear as a result of the constant bombardment of cosmic microparticles that impact our satellite. Moon rocks are estimated to erode at a rate of one millimeter every million years. "In human years it seems like an eternity, but in geological terms there will probably be no traces of the exploration of the Apollo missions in about 10 to 100 million years," says Mark Robinson, a NASA researcher.
