Regolith Gardening: Lunar Artifact Preservation

A patch of Apollo 11's Tranquility Base, rendered as a real 3D lunar surface, ages forward under a simplified model of micrometeorite "gardening" — the slow churning of the top regolith layer by countless small impacts. As simulated time advances, craters accumulate across the patch and the gardening depth grows following a power-law fit to published lunar-regolith turnover studies. Five real Apollo-era features — Neil Armstrong's bootprint, the flag-pole socket, descent-stage debris, a buried core-tube sample and a buried seismometer cable — sit at their approximate real burial depths, and each is engulfed and erased the moment the gardening depth passes it, showing directly why footprints vanish first while buried hardware can survive for a geological age.