 "Apollo
moon rocks are peppered with tiny craters from meteoroid
impacts," explains Dr. David McKay, Chief Scientist for
Planetary Science and Exploration at NASA's Johnson Space
Center (JSC). This could only happen to rocks from a planet
with little or no atmosphere... like the Moon.
Meteoroids are nearly-microscopic specks of comet dust that
fly through space at speeds often exceeding 50,000 mph --
ten times faster than a speeding bullet. They pack a
considerable punch, but they're also extremely fragile.
Meteoroids that strike Earth's atmosphere disintegrate in
the rarefied air above our stratosphere. (Every now and then
on a dark night you can see one -- they're called meteors.)
But the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. The
tiny space bullets can plow directly into Moon rocks,
forming miniature and unmistakable craters.
"There are plenty of museums, including the Smithsonian and
others, where members of the public can touch and examine
rocks from the Moon," says McKay. "You can see the little
meteoroid craters for yourself."
Just as meteoroids constantly bombard the Moon so do cosmic
rays, and they leave their fingerprints on Moon rocks, too.
"There are isotopes in Moon rocks, isotopes we don't
normally find on Earth, that were created by nuclear
reactions with the highest-energy cosmic rays," says McKay.
Earth is spared from such radiation by our protective
atmosphere and magnetosphere.
Even if scientists wanted to make something like a Moon rock
by, say, bombarding an Earth rock with high energy atomic
nuclei, they couldn't. Earth's most powerful particle
accelerators can't energize particles to match the most
potent cosmic rays, which are themselves accelerated in
supernova blastwaves and in the violent cores of galaxies.
Indeed, says McKay, faking a Moon rock well enough to
hoodwink an international army of scientists might be more
difficult than the Manhattan Project. "It would be easier to
just go to the Moon and get one," he quipped.
And therein lies an original idea: Did NASA go to the Moon
to collect props for a staged Moon landing? It's an
interesting twist on the conspiracy theory that TV producers
might consider for their next episode of the Moon Hoax.
"I have here in my office a 10-foot high stack of scientific
books full of papers about the Apollo Moon rocks," added
McKay. "Researchers in thousands of labs have examined
Apollo Moon samples -- not a single paper challenges their
origin! And these aren't all NASA employees, either. We've
loaned samples to scientists in dozens of countries [who
have no reason to cooperate in any hoax]."
Even Dr. Robert Park, Director of the Washington office of
the American Physical Society and a noted critic of NASA's
human space flight program, agrees with the space agency on
this issue. "The body of physical evidence that humans did
walk on the Moon is simply overwhelming."
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