Mythbusters caught in error re: lunar surface albedo

[NinjaPuppy]

[Nostradamus]

Much of this moon hoax baloney can be traced back to 1964 when the Gemini program was running. The president had already started the race to the moon. One of the problems was that we did not have any idea what the surface of the moon was like other than what we could determine from earth. There was a question about the depth of the moon dust or regolith. Someone went to the top of a volcano and began to collect dust. The goal was to sort out the amount of incoming dust into 2 categories: extraterrestrial dust and terrestrial dust. If you knew how much dust was raining down and extrapolated you could get an idea of how much dust would be on the moon. The rate that was determined was multiplied by the estimated age of the solar system and a depth of something like 40 feet was computed.

This computation has been used by creationists to show that our solar system is not old. They point out that the trips to the moon show a certain depth. Divide this by the rate to obtain time and voila the time is small.

So the question is why is there so little dust on the moon?

[NinjaPuppy]

[Nostradamus]

Great chuckle there. I hear that the dust in houses in Indonesia can be great at times due to the fact the the 13, 77 islands of the country are volcanic in origin. At any given time there are lots of eruptions and a great deal of dust in the air.

The simple answer to the dust on the moon is that the experiment done on the volcano did not separate out the terrestrial dust from the material descending from outer space very well. That had been suspected so a follow up experiment was done by measuring the dust in outer space. This was done by measuring the impacts on satellites. The volcano person assumed all of the nickel was extraterrestrial in origin. That turns out to be wrong.

Here are web sites that continue to use the wrong rate of deposition on the moon.



A good description of the science and the history are found here