Apollo Sites from LRO Options

[djellison]

Thought this deserved a new thread- we can't talk about EVERY LRO target in the one thread

I made a mistake in this one - I didn't include the thruster plume guards. My MER/MPF simulation for HiRISE seemed to come out about right - so fingers crossed that this will be there or there abouts as well. Still in a comissioning phase, something of a slant angle - I'd expect approx 1.5m/pixel if it's at the 120km figure mentioned earlier.

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[dvandorn]

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

[Paul Fjeld]

Very good point. So it will be interesting when the highest resolution images come down of that area before Little West to see if those boulders are visible. If not, then how do you characterize a safe landing site from these images?

I've seen a paper somewhere (wish I could remember) describing a system with LIDAR images that are scanned and analyzed automatically for safe zones - perhaps you put in some smarts that adds a buffer to ejecta blankets (call the routine ArmstrongSmarts)?

[robspace54]

Armstrong's said something like that the auto-targeting was taking them into a boulder strewn crater. And a pilot's adage "When in doubt, land long." He did land long, and that worked just fine, thank you very much. If Eagle had been a robot, she would have gone down in that crater, likely to no good end...

Also rememebr that at that point in their descent (you'd have to overlay the ground track under the altitude and velocity profile) they were not in a hover and still had some horizontal velocity to shed. So old Neil put the descent engine thrust more vertical and flew Eagle to a better spot. I guess he was right! :-)

These are fantastic photos and I am enjoying this side discussion very much.

Rob