🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: NASA assumed the Eagle module eventually crashed into the Moon. Now a new analysis suggests it is still up there and might even be detectable from Earth.
On July 21, 1969, Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar ascent stage lifted off from the surface of the Moon to rendezvous with the command module Columbia in orbit. After docking, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin clambered back into Columbia carrying 22 kilograms of lunar rock. The crew then closed the hatch and the command module returned to Earth.
Planetary geologists have long known that the Moon’s mass is not evenly distributed throughout its volume. Instead, underground concentrations of mass lead to tiny variations in the Moon’s gravitational field that make most lunar orbits unstable in the long term. Meador began his task using an open-source program called the General Mission Analysis Tool developed by NASA and others. This models a spacecraft’s trajectory in any gravitational field and is widely used to simulate missions to Earth orbit, to the Moon, to Mars and beyond.
It can even include the effect of solar radiation pressure. By running the program with and without this force, Meador found that this had little effect on Eagle’s orbit. Of course, this stability could be the result of the particular set of starting parameters for the spacecraft in the program — the time of jettison, the latitude, longitude and altitude, heading angle and so on.
But if it has survived, then the spacecraft should be observable today, says Meador. Back in 2009, the Indian Space Research Organization lost contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, a cube-shaped spacecraft less than half the size of Eagle.
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