Lunar Lost & Found: The Search for Old Spacecraft

摘要

Even a casual glance at Earth's Moon reveals craters all across the surface — the scars left behind over the millennia by asteroids and other celestial objects crashing into the surface. But our Moon also has been on the receiving end of a number of artificial impacts over the last few decades. Moon probes and leftover rocket stages have left their own craters — albeit ones dual are too small to see from Earth. Robotic lunar landing spacecraft from the United States and the former Soviet Union dot the Moon as well. Add in the hardware castoff by the U.S. Apollo crews, who made their way to the Moon from 1969 to 1972, and you've got a fair amount of junk on the Moon.