had become the first nation to land a 

 spacecraft on the Moon and the first to 

 photograph the Moon's far side — 

 which is why many surface features on 

 the far side have names like Mare 

 Moscoviense and Gagarin crater. The 

 Soviets were also the first to put a vehi- 

 cle on the Moon: an eight-wheeled ro- 

 botic rover. But flesh-and-blood Amer- 

 icans, walking on the lunar surface and 

 planting the flag, were what U.S. pres- 

 idents wanted the world to see. 



You might think space scientists 

 would have answered all the big ques- 

 tions about the Moon by now, having 

 studied it more than any object in the 

 universe besides Earth itself. You might 

 even think no country would want to 

 bother sending its citizens there any- 

 more. Wrong on both counts. Some of 

 the Moon's deep polar craters might 

 harbor ice, which can be turned into 

 drinking water and rocket fuel. Some 

 of the rocks ejected from Earth during 

 early catastrophic meteorite impacts 

 may have been scattered across the 



Moon's unweathered surface. Some of 

 those rocks — whose Earth-based cous- 

 ins would long ago have been destroyed 

 by our planet's active geology — might 

 harbor intact fossil evidence of Earth's 

 earliest life-forms. Some of the Moon's 

 mineral resources could conceivably be 

 extracted and used by short-term and 

 long-term lunar missions. And as you 

 read this page, not only America's Na- 

 tional Aeronautics and Space Adminis- 

 tration, but also the European Space 

 Agency, the China National Space Ad- 

 ministration, and the Indian Space Re- 

 search Organisation are all actively plan- 

 ning their next missions to the Moon. 



Truth can be even weirder than 

 fiction. Today, astrophysicists and 

 geologists generally agree that the 

 Moon formed several billion years 

 ago when a Mars-size protoplanet 

 slammed into the adolescent Earth [see 

 "Moonstruck," by G. Jeffrey Taylor, Sep- 

 tember 2003 ) . The impact must have 

 been something to behold. It kicked 



up about a hundred quintillion (10 20 ) 

 tons of rock vapor and molten rock 

 blobs — bits and pieces of Earth mixed 

 with bits and pieces of the impactor — 

 some of which shot tens of thousands 

 of miles into space. 



Most of the material that hurtled 

 outward eventually tell back to Earth. 

 Some of it got no farther than about 

 12,000 miles from our planet's center, 

 and formed short-lived rings. Of the 

 material that traveled farther, most of 

 it formed more durable rings, akin to 

 the gorgeous ring system that now en- 

 circles Saturn. From that disk-shaped 

 orbiting platform, the bits and pieces 

 of rock began to coalesce, first through 

 chemical adhesion and ultimately 

 through mutual gravitational attrac- 

 tion. Withinjust a few decades the bulk 

 ot the rubble had merged into a single 

 giant sphere, orbiting twenty times 

 closer to Earth than the Moon does to- 

 day. It must have been a spectacular 

 sight — though no one was around to 

 see it — to have the Moon looming 



it 



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