The moon: look but don't touch, says Nasa

The space agency issues guidelines to safeguard the heritage of lunar exploration, but can it really expect full compliance?

The lunar preservation society: a US flag is surrounded by astronauts' footprints. Photograph: Corbis

It is, in its way, a giant leap for mankind: Nasa has just issued guidelines for the treatment and protection of historical sites on the moon, even though nobody has been there for 40 years, and nobody has plans to visit any time soon. The Acropolis, by contrast, attracted sightseers for centuries before anyone thought to make a rule about not chipping off bits and taking them home.

Such guidelines may seem a bit hypocritical – if you really cared about something, you wouldn't leave it on the moon – but Nasa was prompted to act by the race to land a robot on the lunar surface: 26 privately funded teams are vying to claim the Google Lunar X prize, worth $20m (£13m).

Nasa is proposing to keep the robots out of certain exclusion zones in order to preserve artefacts including hardware from Apollo lunar modules, wire-stiffened US flags, astronaut footprints and ongoing moon experiments. But if it expects full compliance, it really should just put up a sign: "Welcome to the Moon. Please Don't Touch Anything."