IIRC, traverse planning was done for both the H-mission Littrow site and for the H-mission Censorinus site. Had Apollo 14 been able to fly in July of 1970 (per the original every-four-month schedule following the first successful landing), I believe the Littrow site would have been unavailable, and the Censorinus site would have been used. For the October, 1970 date that was settled on after the flights were spread out to every five to six months, Littrow was to have been the site.

Phil likely has the traverse plans for both sites. I just recall that the Censorinus landing point was a kilometer or less west of the crater proper, and the second EVA would have taken then back east to the crater rim. The Littrow site was, I want to say, about 20 km west of the mouth of the valley of Taurus-Littrow, near a wrinkle ridge. The second EVA at that site would have been a walking tour of the wrinkle ridge.

-the other Doug

Ah, Photoshop -- so many nice things one can do with it...

Thanks for the Fra Mauro details, Phil. Looking at it now, I can see why Star crater was never very visible in the photocopy-quality images I've seen in .pdf files. It's not very big at all, just has a rather bright halo (making me believe it would have been difficult to find from the surface, akin to how difficult it was to find Halo crater for the 12 crew). Looks to me like Sunrise would have been a much better choice for getting deep samples.

Also good to see that the planning for 14 also included some downrange-dispersion EVA plans. By the time we got to the official Apollo 14 press kit and such, they were really only showing the prime site and EVA routes.

I do have to wonder, though, whether you might get some different types of rocks from Sunrise vs. Cone. The Imbrium basin ejecta blanket on which the Fra Mauro site is located was rather ropy in texture, emplacing itself in thick, ropy ridges and leaving apparently thinner layers in the valleys between the ridges. Cone was created by a later impact onto the top of one of the thick, ropy ridges (named by the Apollo planners after the crater, Cone ridge). Sunrise seems to have been a similar impact (roughly the same size as Cone, no more than 20% smaller) but into the inter-ridge valley terrain. While I don't believe that either impact could have drilled down beneath the Imbrium ejecta blanket, it would be interesting to compare the mineralogy of samples from the Cone rim to samples from Sunrise's rim. It could tell us whether the uneven-ness of the ejecta, as emplaced, is simply a function of the motion of the ejecta as it re-impacted the surface (wave dynamics and such) or whether there are compositional differences in the possibly thinner, less viscous material that filled in the valleys from the thicker, more viscous material that created the ropy ridges.

-the other Doug

p.s. -- I think that Lovell's comment of "still looking for Star crater" was more along the lines of exaggeration for effect -- rather like someone who had a layover at the San Francisco airport on a very foggy day at the Bay, saying to friends asking about the trip "Well, I'm still looking for the Golden Gate bridge." -dvd

Yeah -- the 13 main traverse plan was nearly identical to the 14 plan (the primary aim point was moved back east about 60m from 13 to 14, which would have put Aquarius on a fairly steep forward-pitching slope in the "deep depression" that Shepard and Mitchell walked through en route from their LM to their ALSEP site).

But the 13 traverse planning began before Apollo 12 demonstrated the pinpoint landing capability, and so some traverse planning was done for various dispersions. They had plans for over- and under-shoots of as much as a kilometer or two; ISTR seeing a traverse plan for a landing short of Cone Ridge, one for a landing in the valley between Cone and Triplet, the final 14 plan for the landing between Doublet and Triplet, and yet another for a landing downrange of Doublet. However, I also STR that there were no significant north-south dispersions considered, just uprange-downrange. (Any links or examples you might have, Phil, of/to the original 13 traverse plans would be most welcome indeed...)

I have to wonder if Lovell expected an overshoot in the primary guidance, since only an overshoot would put Star on their traverse maps, and Lovell was on the record as being determined to do very little LPD-ing and to allow the automatic system land the LM without going into P66 to take manual control. He wanted to demonstrate that the LM was able to land automatically. (Note that every single other CDR in Apollo took over manual control and hand-flew their LMs to their final touchdown points. They used varying degrees of manual control, most of which let the computer control the descent rate while the CDR tooled the LM around with attitude changes. But no one let the LM land in P64, fully automatic mode. Lovell was the only one willing to try it.)

One reason I'd enjoy seeing where Star is located is that it was obviously considered a valuable sampling site, and if we land an unmanned Moon rover near to the Fra Mauro site, we'll want to land it a ways away from the Doublet-Triplet-Cone operations area. I'm thinking it would be really kewl to have such a rover do a geologic investigation of Star before moving in to observe the Apollo artifacts to its east from a respectful distance.

-the other Doug

Phil, I have a question and several others here may enjoy hearing the answer.

When the Fra Mauro site was designated for Apollo 13, they had designed traverses for various landing locations, including a traverse in case the LM landed long, to the west of the Doublet craters. This would have put Cone crater out of range for a crew exploring on foot, so the primary EVA-2 objective from this western location would have been something called Star crater. (When Lovell was leaving the Moon, he made a comment that he was "still looking for Star crater," so I know the crew was very aware of it.)

I've only ever seen Star crater labeled on a map within the Apollo 13 presskit in PDF format, in which you really can't pick out the crater itself. Do you have any way of determining which crater is Star and identifying it on the LRO images? As it was west of Doublet, I would have to imagine it's in the current LRO image of the Fra Mauro region.

-the other Doug

I think in the case of impacts onto gas giants, the old term for a meteor crater, "astrobleme," works well. It really is more of a blemish than a crater -- and like a blemish, it will fade over time.

Almost looks like there was the familiar-from-SL9 "black-eye" effect of downstream ejecta to the left, plus a very long, very dark ejected plume that pushed back out from left to right in these images. I get the feel of an impactor on a shallow, fast trajectory moving from right to left (in the Hubble images; all this would be reversed in the original discovery photos and the Gemini images), the "black-eye" ejecta pushing ahead of the impact site (perhaps defined by shock waves from the impact), and a plume of very dark material (mostly gas, I imagine) being fountained out of the impact site back along the impactor's track, from left to right, making up the very dark, now-deforming oval marking the astrobleme.

Just my gut-level feel from looking at these new, sharp images...

-the other Doug

When landing *anything* on what is essentially a horizontal flight profile for all but the last 100 feet, manned or unmanned, it is always easier to land long. Stopping short means taking out more of your horizontal velocity than planned, more quickly and higher than planned. That maneuver inevitably ends up costing more in fuel than any of the alternatives for steering away from your targeted site. Landing long costs you a little less fuel, and gives you more time to find an acceptable site.

I'm hoping that this kind of thinking is being applied to automated landing systems -- you don't always have a parachute system to kill your horizontal velocity, after all.

-the other Doug

The other tip-off, for me, is to compare it to how Neil says "for mankind." In the first iteration, "for a man," while the subtle "a" isn't really heard, there is an obvious fractional separation between the words. In the second iteration, "for mankind," there is no separation or even fractional pause between the closing "r" of "for" and the opening "m" of "mankind".

-the other Doug

Hmmm... how much of what looks like good flat pavement-stone rock from MRO is actually this kind of pile-up of (relatively recently-emplaced, at least recently enough not to have eroded down to flat yet) jumbled sandstone?

Hopefully, not a lot...

-the other Doug

Alignments are not just apparent. When you change the angle at which you view the body, you change the faces on that body that are in the way of a stream of impactors. If you rotate Steins to a variety of angles, you can line up any number of craters into potential chains.

I think one or two of those craters look suspiciously like sinkholes, and there could well be internal faulting that is causing some of the observed cratering. However, the small but significant size differences, the weathering and appearance differences, and especially the depth differences in the craters in this little chain tell me that at least some of them are impact craters made by somewhat different types of impacts (bigger and smaller impactors, differences in relative velocity, etc.).

When you look closely at the Real World, observed phenomenon are usually the results of blends of causes, not of nice, tidy, neat, this-explains-it-all processes. If two different processes are possible, rest assured that, to one degree or another, the results of both of those processes will be observed.

-the other Doug

It occurs to me that the most massive objects in the Solar System ought to vacuum up the most pieces of debris per any given time period. And we know from the observations made for decades now by solar observatories that the Sun is probably the most frequently impacted body in the Solar System. (How many comets per year make death dives into our local star?)

It would make sense, then, that Jupiter would have the second-highest impact rate in the system. I know this is dependent on the relative abundance of potential impactors at various locations... but, on the scale of the entire system, it still makes sense to me.

-the other Doug

I'm from Illinois originally, and the Illinois and Ohio rural accents are almost identical. Ohio, if anything, has a little more of the tiny touch of that Indiana-Kentucky soft-northern-edge-of-southern accent than Illinois does.

I am, therefore, very familiar with the speech and accent pattern of a small-town Ohio boy like Neil Armstrong. He, as I also do, tends to add the occasional "a" as an almost unpronounced coda between "for" and almost any other word or phrase. More of a slight hesitation than a fully sounded vowel.

In the same speech pattern, the phrase "For a good time, call Jan at 123-555-1212" starts out sounding very much like "Fer-a good time"... with the "a" so lost that, without context, you might actually hear "Fer good time" with the briefest of stutters between the first two words. (In this case, "for" is pronounced about two-thirds of the way between the long "or" sound and the short "er" sound. Might better be spelled "foehr" or even "fur".)

All I can really say, though, is that I can insert an "a" into the famous quote, have it match the flat Midwest accent and speech pattern, *and* have it match the exact timing of the famous quote. It's a natural way for me to say it. So, while I won't swear the "a" was staticked out, I'll say that Neil *could* have said it and have been consistent with his own accent and with what we hear in the transmission.

-the other Doug

Which reminds me -- I would have to imagine that the LROC images will be good enough that we'll be able to make out the enormous mousetrap built by the lost Apollo crew at Sinus Medii, right?



-the other Rod Serling

I daresay it wasn't a cometary impact, as a comet of any reasonable size (i.e., big enough to leave such a visible mark) would have been spotted before now, I would imagine. As long as it had an observable coma and tail, that is (which comets usually do by the time they reach Jupiter's orbit).

-the other Doug

BTW -- my roommate seemed a little disappointed with the Fra Mauro image.

"Where's the golf ball?" is what he said to me.



-the other Doug

I know it has a lot to do with a variety of factors, including sun angle and such, but I'm impressed that the MET tracks in the Fra Mauro images are more visible than LRV tracks are in the Hadley, Descartes and Taurus-Littrow images.

Perhaps the tracks at Fra Mauro are more visible because they are accompanied by a track of footprints (which are more visible in the J-mission site images than are areas where you would only find LRV tracks). But I'm a little surprised that LRV tracks, when unaccompanied by footprint tracks, are far less visible than I would have expected.

-the other Doug

Paul, I think I see a higher population of boulders in the relatively clear area you've outlined than in the area where the LM is located. And seeing as there are fewer boulders visible on the rim and ramparts of West in the LROC image than can be seen on the descent film, I'd imagine that the actual boulder population short of Little West was the determinant in Neil's choice to continue on downrange.

IIRC, you can see the boulder population throughout that area short of Little West in the descent film, and it seems to me that it was the natural outlying fan of ejecta from West. I can certainly understand if Neil, seeing the boulder field thin out, would want to overfly the ejecta field entirely.

-the other Doug

Seems strange to see the sites with sun from the west, though. Never saw these sites in afternoon sun before!

I am *really* looking forward to the pics that will come down from the science orbit!

-the other Doug

Also, isn't it true that there is still a fair degree of controversy over the "discovery" of water ice at the Mercurian poles by Arecibo radar mapping?

I'm tempted to say that all we *really* know is that Mercury's poles show something different than the Moon's poles to Arecibo's radar mapping program. I don't think we can say with any degree of certainty what compositional and environmental differences are causing it.

-the other Doug

Very true, Nick. Especially for revolutionary projects, like the MERs and like MSL.

It's a lot easier to plan a realistic budget for something that's basically been done before than to plan a budget for something that's *never* been done before. The latter tend to vastly underestimate the actual costs that will be incurred during the learning curve-induced episodes of redesign, rework, and retest. This is true of nearly every revolutionary project.

Evolutionary projects, like, say, the design and manufacture of the 737, tend to stay much more within their budgets since aircraft like that generally make use of tried-and-true technology and are being asked to meet performance standards that are very similar to their predecessors', in very well-understood environments. Now, had Boeing in the same timeframe decided to design the 737 as a passenger version of a flying wing (a la the B-2 bomber, et. al.), even if it used the same engines, avionics, etc. as a conventional aircraft, it would end up badly overrunning its budget and take considerably longer to deliver to market than the conventional 737 took.

-the other Doug

Brian? Read "Roving Mars" by Steve Squyres sometime. The MERs came so close to cancellation so many times, it's almost a running joke.

Spirit and Oppy were once spoken of by Ed Weiler, who had the yea-or-nay vote on continuing with them, as things that "would look just great over at Air and Space." Unflown. Forever.

The MERs also got a major descope after the "final" design had been approved -- the Raman spectrometer was axed, something that Squyres has said all along is his greatest regret from the design and assembly phase.

So, no -- the MERs didn't have an easy path. It's almost miraculous that they even got launched. And their costs overran something fierce (I don't remember the original bid numbers vs. the eventual cost through the end of the primary mission, but it was something like a 60% to a 100% overrun.) Their development cycles were every bit as fraught with peril as MSL's has been, perhaps moreso.

-the other Doug

I don't think anyone has ever anticipated finding glaciers of white ice just sitting in the bottoms of polar lunar craters. Exposed ice would sublimate quite quickly when exposed to the vacuum.

Instead, I believe the expectation is to find an "icy regolith" layer (something like a permafrost layer) underneath a completely dry layer of regolith. The minute gaps between the grains of the covering regolith cap would be enough for the tiny amount of sublimation that results in the hydrogen signature detected by Clementine and Lunar Prospector.

-the other Doug

Stu, my understanding is that the "clays" that MRO has been discovering are the phylosilicates that have been discussed at length, especially in the site selection deliberations for MSL.

I'd have the think that any clays found within Endeavour would have to be remnants of earlier aqueous conditions than those which were involved in laying down the Meridiani sulfate sandstones. And considering there must be pieces of the crust underlying those sandstone deposits in the walls of Endeavour, I guess that's not terribly surprising.

Now we need to really hope and pray that Oppy can make it to some of the clay deposits and give them a careful examination. For one thing, clays are the most likely places to find fossilized life remnants, especially bacterial fossils. While Oppy is not all that well equipped to look for anything like that, it could very likely constrain the possibilities in a favorable manner.

Take *real* good care of Oppy for us, guys... now, more than ever, it seems the payoff if we get to Endeavour could be truly astounding.

-the other Doug

I dunno -- some of those rocks are likely the size of a football stadium, if not larger.

-the other Doug

Fascinating -- this surface strongly resembles the "elephant-skin" surface observed in some of the Ranger IX photos of Alphonsus and around Gassendi. Among many other places.

My understanding of the best speculation on what forms this kind of surface is that we're looking at debris flow patterns from large-scale ejecta events (i.e., basin ejecta emplacement events). If this is in the Clavius region, would that imply we're looking at Aiken Basin ejecta debris flow?

-the other Doug

It was basically B-roll kind of stuff (the "interview" was of John Callas), but after dumping a bunch of DE into the pit, walking away, you were clearly heard saying "Whoof!" (I'd have to run the recording again to quote anything else; there was one point while TeeBee was being driven into the pit that you were calling off numbers, for instance, and you were laughing with the woman who was helping fill the pit, clapping your gloves and then, despite the facemasks, coughing like crazy from the DE dust that flew.)

The camera was right behind your head at one point -- I mean, I know scientists and engineers can get a little single-minded at times, but you have to have been aware of the cameras. Now you know what they do with the footage they're taking!

-the other Doug