The other day, the space agency NASA took bizarre images of what scientists say “looked like human footprints” on the lunar surface. However, these tracks were found 16 kilometers further from the place where astronauts have ever conducted research.
The Apollo project was NASA's third human space flight program that landed the first humans on the lunar surface: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Thus, the two legendary astronauts fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon by the late sixties and ended the space race with the Soviet Union.
Five subsequent Apollo missions also brought astronauts to the lunar surface, and this continued until the last mission, Apollo 17. As a result, a total of 12 people visited the surface of the Earth's satellite.
Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt is one of the last humans to set foot on the lunar surface. A geologist by profession, he collected over 700 lunar samples on the longest lunar walk in history.
To make the most of their time, Schmitt and fellow astronaut Eugene Cernan rode over 35 kilometers on the rover. Without wind and earthquakes on the moon, their footprints will remain intact for millions of years.
Schmitt himself described how he developed a unique technique to explore as much of the surface as possible:
'I thought in advance what I need to do in a limited time. I slid over the surface and pushed with my toes every time I fell, accelerating that way.
When we started from the moon, you could look out the window and see the launch pad, as well as the tracks left around it. '
These trails were still there nearly 40 years later, when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent back high-resolution images of the Moon in 2009.
“It was really fun to see these pictures of where you were 40 years ago, and nothing has changed. There are footprints everywhere, and we did cross them several times and poke fun at someone who was here before us. '
However, the jokes ended when one of the images sent from the lunar orbiter showed traces 55 kilometers from the landing site.
NASA scientists and lunar scientists Peter Schultz and Uyam Byrnes said the find was strikingly similar to someone literally marching on the surface. At the same time, despite the similarity with human tracks, the size of the tracks themselves is much larger than human tracks.
The tracks were found 16 kilometers further from the place where the astronauts traveled, but professor and geologist Benjamin Weiss noted that they had nothing to do with human exposure:
'If the tracks were traced by a chain of meteors, they should be in a straight line. If we exclude the meteors, then we have only one thing – to look for similar structures in the solar system. In our opinion, the clue is the lava layers in California, where such craters cover a huge territory. '
“We believe that these linear chains of holes are the result of volcanic processes on the Moon billions of years ago. Apparently, there used to be large accumulations of lava on the lunar surface. '
