What might be waiting on the Dark Side of the Moon
No human has ever walked on the dark side of the moon.
It's been over 50 years since anyone has set foot on the moon at all. The last crewed moon landing by any nation was Apollo 17, in 1972. And all six missions that landed humans on the moon targeted the near side. We've mapped the dark side from afar, but no one's set foot there. The dark side remains a mystery. Naturally, this has led to some pretty fantastic theories on what might await us up there.
In 2007, a YouTuber named "retiredafb" -- later identified as William Rutledge -- made one of the more intriguing claims about the dark side. He said he commanded the crew of Apollo 20, a mission NASA planned but never executed, at least officially. According to Rutledge, his three man crew successfully landed on the dark side of the moon in 1976, in the Delporte Crater.
The alien ship that had crashed there wasn't hard to find. The cigar-shaped craft was over 1.5 miles long. But Rutledge's story didn't stop with finding an alien craft. His crew entered the ship and discovered the body of the pilot, an alien female he called Mona Lisa. This humanoid had large eyes and elongated fingers, similar to common conceptions of aliens you find in movies. It would be easily dismissed as nonsense, if it weren't for one thing: the astronauts filmed the whole thing. You can look it up on YouTube. Video of the inside of the alien ship, and the alien itself, they became the driving force in spreading this astounding story.
But it's all been debunked.
NASA did have Apollo 18, 19, and 20 planned on paper, but the truth is, budget cuts ended these missions before they started. Finally, it was the Chinese who put rumors of giant alien space ships or secret moon bases on the dark side to rest, when they landed the first-ever uncrewed lunar probe there in 2019.
The mission was called Chang'e-4, named for the Chinese moon goddess. It included a robotic rover. Turns out the far side is pretty much the same as the near side. Both are heavily cratered from meteorite and asteroid impacts. Generally, the far side is more mountainous. It's also not dark - the term "dark side" actually doesn't fit. The side we don't see experiences full lunar days just like the side we see.
Bottom line, Chang'e-4 found no mile-long alien space ships. The probe's exploration was relatively uneventful.
That is, until the eighth lunar day of its mission.
That's when the Chang'e-4's rover discovered a strange substance on the far side, inside a giant crater. It was dark green, and glistened as if made from gel.
The rover had no ability to collect a sample. But it did have a spectrometer on board to analyze the substance. Scientists identified the mystery stuff as "impact melt breccia", a type of rock that forms when the heat of a meteorite impact melts the broken pieces of lunar crust. They were unable to bring any home to verify. But a new study suggests that might have been for the best.
Life can't survive on the moon. It has no atmosphere, no water, and the temperatures are fatal, to put it bluntly. It gets as hot as 260 degrees Fahrenheit and one day on the moon is nearly thirty Earth days. But there are unique spots at the bottom of craters on the far side where life may find a way -- not to live, but to be preserved in a frozen state.
The unique spots have a name. Scientists call them "Permanently Shadowed Regions", or PSR's. Because of the moon's tilt and the shape of these giant craters, the areas never get sun. There are PSR's in the Shackleton and Faustini craters on the far side of the moon that haven't received sunlight for billions of years. Temperatures in these spots stay as low as minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's in these PSR's that scientists theorized microbes could survive. And a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference proved it was possible. Scientists modeled the environment in the PSR's, mimicking the ultraviolet radiation. And they determined these cold pockets could preserve microbes, even as they were exposed to the vacuum of space. Turns out, PSR's might be the most protective environments in the solar system for alien microbes to hide out.
If only they could find a visiting ship to contaminate and hitch a ride to a habitable world, they could live again.
Turns out, this is exactly the plan. Sometime in 2027, NASA's Artemis mission will visit the Shackleton Crater and take samples home. They'll be looking for ice and water and anything future astronauts might use for fuel or oxygen. But they'll be running the risk of bringing back unwanted microbes and introducing them to Earth. Where microbes thrive.
