Dust on the Moon's surface?

Abstract

This letter was stimulated by an interesting coincidence. The publication of Jaffe's [1966] article in the February 15 issue of this Journal coincided closely with the news about the first ‘soft landing’ on the moon achieved by the unmanned Russian space probe Luna 9 on February 9, 1966. Truly close-up photographs by a camera stationed about 60 cm above the lunar surface were radioed back to earth. As an example, reference can be made to the picture reproduced on page 56 of the March 1966 issue of Scientific American which was accompanied by a brief summary of discussions attributed to N. Barabashov, a leading Soviet selenologist, who emphasized that the probe did not sink into the ‘soil’ to any substantial degree and concluded that the surface of the moon appears to be quite solid, or a sponge-like, rough-textured mass scattered with individual sharp-edged fragments of various sizes.