The Moon Museum

The Moon Museum is a tiny ceramic chip, about 1.9 by 1.3 cm, smaller than a postage stamp. On it are six black-and-white drawings by six American artists: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and Forrest Myers. It is often called the first artwork made for space. Together, the tiny drawings were meant to be a museum for the Moon.

The story says the chip was secretly attached to the Apollo 12 lunar module, Intrepid, which landed on 19 November 1969 in the Ocean of Storms. NASA never officially approved the project and has never confirmed it. If the story is true, the chip is still on the Moon, fixed to the lower stage of the lander that stayed behind when the astronauts flew home.

The story

Sculptor Forrest Myers came up with the idea of sending art to the Moon. He asked NASA, but in his words the agency never said no and never said yes. So he worked with a group called Experiments in Art and Technology and with engineers at Bell Laboratories, who used the same methods they used for telephone circuits to etch the drawings onto small wafers. A worker at Grumman, the company building the lunar module, is said to have agreed to fix one to the lander in secret.

The mystery

Two days before launch, Myers got a telegram saying the chip was in place and all systems were go. The New York Times revealed the project on 22 November 1969, while Apollo 12 was flying home. But there is no photo of the chip on the lander, and nobody can be sure it is really there without going back to look. It does make the story more believable that technicians have admitted tucking small personal items into the lander's gold blankets.

What is on the chip

Each artist made a small drawing. Warhol drew his initials, Rauschenberg drew a single line, and Oldenburg drew a geometric version of Mickey Mouse. Novros and Chamberlain made patterns that look a little like electronic circuits, and Myers made a drawing produced with a computer. Between about 16 and 20 chips were made, one meant for the lander and the rest kept on Earth as copies.

On the 3D Moon

On the 3D Moon you can find the Moon Museum hidden at the Apollo 12 site in the Ocean of Storms, where the lander's lower stage still stands and Surveyor 3 waits nearby.