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Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website
A whole host of documents presenting work and recommendations of US scientists and engineers in service of NASA’s Moon exploration goals have gone missing from the website of the agency-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG). The missing documents include but is not limited to the key 2023 CLOC-SAT report by US lunar experts, which urged NASA to plan a replacement for the 2009-launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to support the increasingly important, upcoming NASA-funded robotic and crewed Moon missions part of the US Artemis program. The link to the report now leads to a dead page with no fallback. Here’s an archived version of the report thanks to the Internet Archive. In fact, the whole master list of LEAG’s annual meeting reports and other such high-level documents dating back two decades is gone. Here’s an archived list of them.
Similarly, the document archive of work by researchers contributing to the Extraterrestrial Materials Analysis Group (ExMAG) in direct support of NASA’s Solar-System-wide sample return missions, which includes Artemis, is also a dead webpage now. Here’s an archived link of the same.
This global loss of accessible scientific information has happened because the new US administration with its many recent executive orders — in the name of…
