The question is timely. NASA has just requested opinions on the risks of contamination of lunar sites by planned missions. And a conference was held last week on lessons from terrestrial environmental justice that could be applied to pollution caused by space activities on other planets.
“Current plans for lunar exploration are not as such criticized because of the risk of contamination,” explains Parvathy Prem, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who published an analysis of contamination in 2020 in the journal GJR Planets lunar ice with fuel from past and future missions. “But there is more and more work on quantifying contamination risks, in order to better plan missions. We must first decide what constitutes contamination on space sites. »
The virtual conference, organized by JustSpace Alliance, an American organization founded in 2018, features sessions on “rights of nature,” “non-human life” and “environmental intersectionalism.” Ms. Prem co-signed a call in April in Nature Astronomy to take into account the opinions of First Nations on space exploration, in response to the private plan to spread ashes on the Moon in January. The private mission, Peregrine, ultimately experienced a complete failure and did not reach the Moon.
Last winter in Nature Geoscience, a geoarchaeologist from the University of Kansas, Justin Holcomb, proposed defining a lunar geological era that began in 1959 with the Soviet Luna 2 probe: the “lunar Anthropocene.”
In early 2023, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a Paris-based NGO, created an Aerospace Heritage Council (ISCoAH). Dr. Holcomb is part of ISCoAH and presented his concept of the lunar Anthropocene at its inaugural conference in May.
The committee wants to involve the Chinese and Russian space programs in the concern for space contamination and archaeological preservation. “Our chairman, Gai Jorayev, is a specialist in the history of the Soviet space program and he has just accepted an academic position in Macau,” Holcomb says.