Hello Everyone,
Just wondering if an astronaut dies on the moon and his body was left there, what would happen to it? Would it decompose or mummify? Would it make a difference if it was in a space suit or not?
I was reading a book about The Lady Be Good and how the bodies were found decades later in the desert. It was commented that they were still recognizable as the desert climate preserved the bodies. Would space do the same with no air or, for lack of a better term, worms to decompose the body?
At “noon” on the moon (in the month of June) the temperature reaches 260(little circle)F. At “midnight” it reaches negative 280(little circle)F. So it will alternate between freezing and cooking every month.
In vacuum, the moisture would start to evaporate immediately. If the body is in the Sun, it should become completely desiccated. If the body is always in a shadow (e.g. in a crevasse), I think it would freeze solid, because the evaporating water carries away heat.
If in a sealed specesuit, in the open, it’ll freeze at night, then thaw and rot during the day.
Wouldn’t the majority or all of the bacteria be killed during the freeze? I’m thinking more liquify due to cellular breakdown due to freeze and thaw cycle?
Wouldn’t it depend on exactly when you croaked on the Moon? I mean if you died there at “noon”, you’d basically heat up fairly fast, and then be cooked. So the only real decomposition you’d suffer would be for as long as it took you to go from 98.6 to something like 160, which would be dependent on where you were, how much sunlight you got, etc…
But once you were past 160, you’d effectively be pasteurized very well. So you’d be cooked and in a sense, canned.
Then as it became lunar “dusk”, the temps would eventually fall into a range where bacteria could again thrive, but the vast, vast majority would have been killed by the high temps, so they’d only reproduce so much before the temperature would get cold enough to keep them from reproducing. Then you’d be frozen for a month.
Lather rinse repeat. As I see it, your initial warm-up/cool-down period would be the time of most decomposition, as you’re at ideal temp when you die, and the bacteria would be present in their highest concentrations.
So it would ultimately come down to how long it would take you to heat up/cool down past the temperatures where decomposition take place.
There’s bound to be some bacteria in a body that could survive the hot time and the frozen time. They’d do their thing in between as long as there’s moisture (and therefore not directly exposed to the vacuum). But they’d be a small percentage at first and could only do a little bit on mild days. It would take a while. They’d probably run out of moisture long before they run out of food. A sealed spacesuit would prevent the drying out and they’d just keep going until the biologically available energy is used up. No, if some photosynthesizing stuff happened to be around the face mask, then some new energy can be input into the system and you have yourself a limited ecosystem that could go a long time. But eventually the suit skin or it’s seals will start leaking and then fade out.
Apparently not, this article talks about how e-coli is often stored in freezers at -80C. The lunar surface at night can get even colder than that, but not much (around -100C).
I have heard someone describe what happens to a human body exposed to the vacuum and cold temperatures of space is similar to the process of freeze-drying is that accurate? Is that what you describing?
Obtained at the Isle of Wight, of course. But mustn’t a lunar zombie be pre-bitten in order to go zomb-ish? Let’s assume Luna is infested with long-fanged alien zombie pillbugs. Hapless humans land, raise wired flags, hop around, and are attacked by zombugs who bite right through the ten-zillion-dollar pressure suits. What then?