For Flag Day I pulled out a few extraterrestrial flags that humans have placed on other worlds.
On The Moon:
Have to start off with the big one, Apollo 11’s flag. The flags placed by the Apollo astronauts remain the only flags ever planted on the surface of another world by a human being. Also they are the only ones actually on flag poles! Whether these flags are still around today is debatable – a number of them were knocked over during lift-off of the Lunar Excursion Module’s (LEM) Ascent stage, as they were placed too close to the LEM. Buzz Aldrin has mentioned that he saw the flag get knocked over when he and Neil Armstrong left the Moon.
This blurry image is a screen capture I made from of video footage from the video camera left behind on the Moon after Apollo 17 left. In this case the flag remained standing, and can be seen as the blurry rectangle on the right of the image. Even that flag however may not really be in that great of shape. For 40 years they have been exposed to the extreme day/night heating cycles of the Moon, vicious UV light from the Sun, and potentially micrometeoritic bombardment, if the fabric is still there at all it may very well be essentially bleached white!
More flags than just the US flag are on the Moon. In the above image from the Soviet Union’s Luna 17 Lander (bringing with it the Lunokhod Rover). The Soviet Union’s flag can bee seen on the right hand side of the image.
While not a soft landing, India’s flag arrived on the moon on the side of the Moon Impact Probe, from the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. Japan and China both have also had “hard” landings on the Moon – but I haven’t been able to track down a clear image of national flags on either Japan’s Hiten and Selene/Kaguya probes, or on China’s Chang'e 1.
On Mars
Moving even further away from Earth, here is the flag carried on the body of the Viking 2 Lander on the surface of Mars. The Viking probes were a pair of orbiter and lander probes that pretty much were the backbone of Mars data until the 1990’s.
In the mid 1990’s, Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars with the flag decal seen above in this pre launch image, but to my knowledge there are no images of the flag on Mars since the camera mast was above the decal and couldn’t see it. I think the same is true for the Mars Expedition Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity
The Phoenix Mars Lander was able to include this flag here while taking images of the polar regions of Mars where it landed in 2008.
On Venus:
No images of the Soviet Union's flag itself from the surface of Venus, but here it is painted on the side of the Venera 13 Lander, which would eventually land on Venus in 1982, and managed to operate for 127 minutes (about 4 times longer than planned!) in the harsh (460C/900F and 90ATM) condition on the surface of Venus.
And beyond…
Finally, while this flag did not end up on the surface of any world, I think it deserves a bit of special mention here. This is John Casani, Voyager Project Manager, holding a small flag that was to be folded and sewn into the thermal blankets of the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. The Voyagers are the two most distant objects from Earth ever made by humans (not counting radio signals!) and are now at 18 and 14.7 billion kilometers from Earth. You can even follow them on twitter – @NASAVoyager2 updates it’s distance and engineering tasks!
I’m still putting together a final collection, a few other probes which may have placed flags on other worlds that I’m interested in finding out about are NEAR Shoemaker (soft-crashed onto asteroid 433 Eros in 2001), Galileo (burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003). I don’t think there was a flag on the Deep Impact impactor that collided with comet 9P/Tempel, and my understanding is that ESA doesn’t include national flags on their missions (the Huygens lander on Saturn’s moon Titan for example). If you’ve got info on these or any others hit me up on twitter @rocksinspace.
