Future Moon: The Footsteps of Explorers

In this activity, learners drop impactors onto layers of graham crackers! The process models how impacts throughout the Moon's history have broken rocks down into a mixture of dust, rocks, and boulders that covers the lunar surface. Learners consider how the dust will continue to hold a record of human exploration--in the form of astronaut bootprints--for countless years in the future. Learners may examine a type of Earth soil ("lunar soil simulant") that is similar to what is found on the Moon’s surface and that would have been shaped by the processes explored here. Learners create their own records of exploration by making rubbings of their shoes. This activity station is part of a sequence of stations that can be set up to help learners trace the Moon's 4.5-billion-year history from "infancy" to the imagined future. Learners tie together major events in the Moon's geologic history as a series of comic panels in their Marvel Moon comic books.