Apollo mission manifests included specific contingency spares and equipment left on the lunar surface.
the verdict
INSUFFICIENT LEANING
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
2 sources for · 0 against
Museum and scientific records confirm that Apollo missions left scientific packages and equipment such as the lunar rover and magnetometers on the lunar surface; however, details regarding specific contingency spares manifests are not established by these sources.
Memento Moon: Some of What We’ve Left Behind | National Air and Space Museum
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Memento Moon: Some of What We’ve Left Behind
Nov 09, 2021
Between 1969 and 1972, twelve astronauts successfully landed on the Moon and returned to Earth, bringing back with them lunar samples and scientific data, and, perhaps most importantly, a new understanding of what it meant to be human. But what did they leave behind? In addition to their footprints, long-term scientific experiments such as the Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP), and discarded equipment such as the lunar rover, some astronauts left a more unique mark on the Moon. Learn about some of things we left behind on the Moon below. One of the most well-known and notable items was left behind by the first people on the Moon: the Apollo 11 astronauts. The Apollo 11 goodwill disk was a silicon disc, which, in exceedingly tiny type, displays goodwill messages from world leaders. The creation and placement of this marker on the Moon symbolized that Apollo 11 was not just an American success, but an achievement for all humanity.
The Apollo 11 goodwill disc that was left on the Moon. The disc featured an inscription that read: “Goodwill messages from around the world brought to the Moon by the astronauts of Apollo 11.” Around the rim of the disk was an additional inscription: “From Planet Earth -- July 1969.” Image courtesy of NASA
The size of a US Mint 50-cent piece, the disc carried messages from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon as well as messages of goodwill from leaders of 73 countries around the world. Among the different messages, some expressed reverence for progress and the increase of knowledge: "On behalf of the British people I salute the skill and courage which have brought man to the moon. May this endeavor increase the knowledge and well-being of mankind." Elizabeth R.* Others, such as Canada, looked mo
<p>Our previous study of the restored Apollo Lunar Surface Magnetometer (LSM) data discovered that narrowband ion cyclotron waves were often observed at the Apollo 15 and 16 landing sites when the Moon was in the Earth’s magnetotail (Chi et al., 2013). Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain the excitation of ion cyclotron waves at the Moon: the absorption of ions at the lunar surface and the pickup ions from the lunar exosphere. Either process can lead to an ion velocity distribution unstable to ion cyclotron instability, but it is of particular interest to investigate which ion cyclotron waves are associated with the latter mechanism so that the observations of them can provide hints to the type and the number of pickup ions escaped from the lunar exosphere. More recently, Nakagawa et al. (2018) examined the Kaguya data and found similar ion cyclotron waves in the Earth’s magnetotail but at a very low occurrence rate.</p><p>In this study, we perform statistical analysis on the full set of the restored LSM data, including those from the Apollo 12, 15, and 16 missions between 1969 and 1975, that were only partially available to our previous study. We find that the ion cyclotron waves were observed by Apollo 15 LSM approximately 5% of the time, which is about six times more frequently than that found in Kaguya observations. A slightly lower occurrence rate of ion cyclotron waves is found in the Apollo 16 LSM data because of the strong local crustal magnetic field at the Apollo 16 site and the conservation of the Poynting flux. Future joint measurements by lunar landers and orbiters can enable a true comparison of the ion cyclotron waves on the lunar surface and at different altitudes of the exosphere.</p>
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