Moon Dust

Although most people do not know it, one of the reasons so much money was spent to send a rocket to the moon was to see how thick the dust was on its surface)

Evolutionists had long held to the fact (as we do) that the earth and moon are about the same age. But many scientists think the earth and its moon are billions of years old. If that were true, the moon would by now have built up a 20-60 mile 132 to 96.5 km] layer of dust on it! In the 1950s, * R.A. Lyttleton, a highly-respected astronomer, said this:

"The lunar surface is exposed to direct sunlight, and strong ultra-violet light and X-rays [from the sun] can destroy the surface layers of exposed rock and reduce them to dust at the rate of a few ten-thousandths of an inch per year. But even this minute amount could, during the age of the moon, be sufficient to form a layer over it several miles deep."*R.A. Lyttleton, quoted in R. Wysong, Creation-Evolution Controversy, p. 175.

In 5 to 10 billion years, 3 or 4/10,000 ths of an inch per year would produce 20-60 miles [32 to 96.5 km) of dust. In view of this, our men at NASA were afraid to send men to the moon. Landing there, they would be buried in dust and quickly suffocate! So first NASA sent an unmanned lander to its surface, which made the surprising discovery that there is not even 20 feet [32 km] of dust on the moon! But in spite of that discovery, Neil Armstrong was decidedly worried about this dust problem as his March 1970 flight in Apollo 11 neared. He feared his lunar lander would sink deeply into it and he and Edwin Aldrin would perish. But because the moon is young, they had no problem. There is not over 2 or 3 inches [5.08 or 7.62 cm] of dust on its surface! That is the amount one would expect if the moon were about 6-8,000 years old.

Dr. Lyttleton's facts were correct; solar radiation does indeed turn the moon rocks into dust. With only a few inches of dust, the moon cannot be older than a few thousand years.

It is significant that studies on the moon have shown that only 1 /60th of the one- or two-inch dust layer on the moon originated from outer space. This has been corrobated by still more recent measurements of the influx rate of dust on the moon, which also do not support an old moon.

There has been a noticeable silence on this matter after the Apollo landings began. Evolutionary scientists are baffled by this obvious evidence for a young moon, when all theoretical calculations do, indeed, support Lyttleton's analysis that if the moon were really old, it would have a great thickness of moon dust resulting from millions of years of bombardment by solar energy and by meteorites of all sizes.

Before the first manned landing on the moon, *Isaac Asimov summarized the problem of thick moon dust produced over the billions of years that it has existed:

"But what about the Moon? It travels through space with us and although it is smaller and has a weaker gravity, it, too, should sweep up a respectable quantity of micro-meteors.

"To be sure, the Moon has no atmosphere to friction the micro-meteors to dust, but the act of striking the Moon's surface should develop enough heat to do the job. . On the Moon there are no oceans to swallow the dust, no winds to disturb it, or life forms to mess it up generally, one way a another. The dust that forms must just lie there, and if the Moon gets anything like Earth's supply, it could be dozens of feet thick. In fact, the dust that strikes crater walls quite probably rolls downhill and collects at the bottom, forming drifts that could be 50 feet deep or more. Why not?

"I get a picture, therefore, of the first spaceship [to the moon], picking out a nice level place for landing purposes, coming slowly downward tail-first and sinking majestically out of sight." *Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science: A Thirty-Year Retrospective (1989), pp. xvi-xvii (This was *Asimov's first published science essay (1958), reprinted in a 1989 book.)

  

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