(The 50th anniversary of the Moon landing) You may not know that the Moon has a scent. The 12 astronauts, who landed and took off from the Earth’s satellite in six Apollo missions, in the period 1969-1972, reported the moon dust having an intense smell. Most astronauts said the scent was unpleasant, and it reminded them of gunpowder. However, there were impressions of it reminding them of the aroma of wet ash in a fireplace.
Bearing in mind that the Moon does not have an atmosphere, and that astronauts walked, jumped and explored its surface, they could only smell the odour of the moon dust after their return to the lunar module. The dust on the Moon’s surface is very fine and soft (like snow, according to astronauts’ words), and as much as they cleaned their suits, it seeped into every pore and got into the module with the astronauts. It was there that they could feel its smell while talking the suits off.
Apollo astronauts were mainly military pilots; therefore, the comparison with the smell of gunpowder is understandable since they know it pretty well, however, what is strange is that the chemistry of the lunar soil is rather different from the gunpowder composition. It is generally believed that the smell draws from the million-year-settled lunar dust being exposed to moisture in the module (the smell also appears when desert sand gets wet).
This finding is just one among numerous legacies of the historical undertaking of sending two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, to the Moon. Half a century ago, on 20 July 1969, they landed in the Sea of Tranquillity crater in the lunar module Eagle and spent a bit more than two hours walking around as the first humans on the moon’s surface. The famous NASA photograph shows the pilot Edwin Aldrin, photographed by Neil Armstrong, mission commander and the first man on the Moon.
‘There is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface,’ Aldrin later noted down, in the book titled ‘Magnificent Desolation’, he co-published with Ken Abraham, which is a travelogue from the journey, but also a description of his recovery from crisis and alcoholism episodes, which he experienced after the mission.
‘I realised that what I was looking at, towards the horizon, and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. I saw the curved horizon – without the atmosphere, black sky. Cold, colder than anyone could experience on the Earth. No sign of life’ writes Aldrin.
Following their return, on 24 July 1969, when they landed in the command module in the Pacific, together with Michael Collins, according to reports, all three astronauts were treated with iodine solution to kill ‘moon germs.’ Afterwards, they were transported by helicopters and a ship to Hawaii, where they were quarantined. The customs declaration is interesting since the port of arrival listed was Honolulu and the port of departure was the Moon.
In the NASA reports on the Apollo mission, the conclusions in article 7 state that ‘No microorganisms from the extra-terrestrial source were recovered from either the crew or the spacecraft’. As expected, the report concludes that the mission was successful and that ‘the national goal for the people to land on the Moon and safely return by the end of the decade, was achieved.’ As part of the same Apollo programme, five more missions were successfully completed, and the space race between the USSR and the USA transformed into a difficult-to-repeat but certainly one of the greatest endeavours in the history of mankind.
S.B.
Photo: NASA