Long before Neil Armstrong piloted the first crewed lunar lander onto the moon and uttered his now-famous words "The Eagle has landed," there were grave concerns that any craft attempting to land on the moon would be swallowed up by an unforgiving ocean of dust.

"It would have been one of the most anticlimactic and horrific moments in history," radio astronomer Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England, told Live Science. "And I doubt the space program would have continued."