LAS CRUCES, N.M. -- Few would connect when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon to archeology -- it isn't the stuff of Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids.

"I'm pretty far from Indiana Jones," said NMSU associate professor Dr. Beth O'Leary. "What's on the moon is a bunch of archeological sites. Now, they're not very ancient, but they represent human technology at a certain stage."

O'Leary has spent the last few years of her life documenting the artifacts of the lunar missions. From stuff brought back like a camera, to stuff left behind, like a three by five American flag, or even a footprint.

"Unless you plan for how you're going to preserve stuff for the future, things can get lost," O'Leary told KFOX.

She said efforts like the recent NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is photographing the moon including Apollo landing sites, are just one step.

O'Leary is now leading an effort to qualify the Apollo 11 landing site as a National Historic Landmark.

"Yeah, that stuff may be impacted in the future, in your lifetime, in our kids' lifetime, people will go back to the moon, and we need to have a framework in place that will allows, I think the world, it has to be an international effort to decide on a protocol," she said.

But she is in uncharted territory, much like the very efforts made 40 years ago.

"It's difficult because nobody owns the moon. It's kind of regulated by treaty, and they didn't think about historic regulation when they wrote the outer space treaty in '67," said O'Leary. "What we're trying to do is make people aware of how we can preserve our heritage off Earth."

O'Leary has just published a book about her work, called "The Handbook Of Space Engineering, Archaeology And Heritage," which she said has a little bit of everything for anyone interested in space.