Apollo Bootprints Might Endure for a Million Years on the Moon

The Moon’s windless, waterless environment preserves Apollo bootprints for a very long time, with LRO imagery showing tracks decades after the landings. However, slow erosion from micrometeorite impacts and a process called impact gardening gradually churns the top few centimeters of regolith, meaning there’s no precise expiry date for a single print. A million-year timescale is plausible but not guaranteed, and some experts estimate traces could fade over tens to hundreds of millions of years. In any case, the landing-site marks will outlast nearly all human-made structures while slowly disappearing on geological timescales.