NASA's Preservation Guidelines

Motivated in part by the Google Lunar X-Prize competition, which offers special prize money to the team that takes images of Apollo landing sites with its lunar rover, NASA has developed guidelines aimed at preserving as they are both manned and unmanned NASA landing sites for future historical and scientific study.

Under existing international law, no nation can claim territory on the Moon, so the United States cannot simply ban people and rovers from its lunar landing sites. It still owns the equipment and experiment packages left at those sites, however, and the NASA guidelines focus on those, along with the tracks in the lunar dust made by astronauts on foot and astronauts driving the manned lunar rovers.

The sites of Apollo 11 and Apollo 17-- the first and last Apollo lunar landings-- are given special protection under the guidelines.