nuclear-news

In the following decades, while no other nuclear device was detonated in an act of war, military tests and studies continued.

Seventy-five years later, space archaeologists are wondering how to warn humanity of the future that the sites where these experiments were carried out are still dangerous, Alice Gorman, associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told The Jerusalem Post.

“The type of plutonium used in the Trinity Test, plutonium-239, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that after this time, only half of it will have decayed into a safe, non-radioactive element. How do we communicate to people living then that the site is dangerous?”

The issue is especially important for archaeologists of the future because in some cases, while the danger would be very limited or

not even relevant on the surface, the nuclear waste and its radiation are deeper in the ground, and conducting a dig would be

especially risky. For example, such is the case of Maralinga, a remote area in southern Australia where the UK conducted several

nuclear tests.

Some nuclear tests were conducted in outer space, and nuclear fuel was employed as propellant for rockets.
If the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibited nuclear weapons in space, the issue of its weaponization remains very relevant.“Recently, Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, reawakening the debate,” Gorman told the Post.

She began to work in space archaeology following years of work focused on stone-tool analysis and the aboriginal use of bottle glass after European settlement.

Space archaeology deals with the same issues of regular archaeology, understanding material culture, human behavior and the interaction with the surrounding environment, Gorman said.

“However, we are looking at the post-Second World War period, when the very same rockets that had been developed as missiles started to send spacecraft into orbit,” she said. “We are interested in all of what is on earth, like rocket launch sites or tracking antennas and reception development, as well as town or residential areas where people who worked on these projects live, but also satellites, space junk and all the places on other planets where humans have sent spacecrafts.”

Gorman was drawn to space archaeology by the idea of exploring space junk, those many objects that cannot even be seen in the sky circling the Earth. Currently, she is working on the archaeology of the International Space Station.
The recent attempt by Israel to land a robotic unit on the moon with the Beresheet mission represents a very interesting development for space archaeologists, Gorman said.

“For many decades, the only material cultures present on the moon were the American and the Soviet one,” she said. “As new countries have started to reach the moon, this has changed, bringing more diversity to the field.”