An astronaut left a framed family photo sitting on the surface of the Moon
In 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke stepped onto the Moon and placed a small, clear plastic-wrapped photo of his family on the lunar soil. On the back, he signed a message for anyone who might find it. Without wind, rain, or liquid water, the photo remains sitting on the lunar dust where he dropped it, though solar ultraviolet radiation has likely bleached the image completely white over time.
A Personal Keepsake in the Descartes Highlands
In April 1972, during the Apollo 16 mission, astronaut Charles Duke became the tenth person to walk on the lunar surface. Amid the intensive scientific objectives of exploring the Descartes Highlands—gathering rock samples, driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and deploying research instruments—Duke took a quiet, planned moment to leave something distinctly personal behind. He placed a small, clear plastic-wrapped color photograph of his family directly onto the gray lunar regolith.
The photograph showed Duke, his wife Dorothy, and their two young sons, Charles and Thomas, sitting together in a backyard. Before setting it down, Duke had prepared the back of the picture with a handwritten message: 'This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke from planet Earth who landed on the moon on April 20, 1972.' Below the text, his family members had added their signatures, creating a direct message from a single household to whoever or whatever might encounter the artifact in the distant future.
Before moving on with his mission duties, Duke stepped back and used his spacesuit-mounted Hasselblad camera to document the photograph resting in the dust. The resulting image captured the small picture lying beside the sharp, distinct impression of an astronaut's bootprint, preserving both the artifact and its placement for the historical record before the crew concluded their surface operations.
Charles Duke and the Apollo Program
Charles Duke's journey to the Moon was shaped by several central moments in early human spaceflight. An officer and test pilot in the United States Air Force, Duke was selected in NASA's fifth astronaut group in 1966. Long before stepping onto the lunar surface himself, his voice became globally recognizable during the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969, where he served as the spacecraft communicator, or CapCom, in Mission Control.