Photo by: NASA
Yesterday, NASA launched a 280 million dollar unmanned rocket dubbed LADEE (The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer).
This project may be different from other NASA projects in that its announced purpose isn’t to search for the origins of life in other world environments. Instead it’s an exploration designed to help scientists learn how to survive an environment where even the dust seems life threatening.
According to an interesting BBC news article, the dust of the moon is not like terrestrial dust. Instead it is made up of “ a fine particulate material, which comprises remnant rock shattered through eons of meteorite impacts, is considered a major hazard.”
According to a NASA’s LADEE project manager, “Terrestrial dust is like talcum powder. On the Moon, it’s very rough. It’s kinda evil. It follows electric field lines; it works its way into equipment. One of the questions about dust on the Moon is an engineering question: how do you design things so that they can survive the dust environment.”
As it turns out, NASA’s latest project may be saying something about the origin of life, after all. According to Genesis, in creating the heavens and the earth, God made our first parent of the dust of the earth. It was only after our declaration of independence, that he gave that dust back to us as our legacy… (Gen 3:18)… that turns out to be our surprisingly merciful escape route of return…
According to the author of Psalm 103, our patient and understanding God (Psa 103:8-13) knows us far better than we know ourselves (Psa 103:14).
Maybe the mysterious, life-threatening nature of moon dust says something not just about a NASA project, but about the inclination of our own dust-to-dust-inclination to find a way of surviving outside of the finely designed world, purpose, and God who made us for himself.
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