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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[kenny]

At the beginning of this thread there is some discussion about the visiblity of the flags. Doubtless this will be re-visited when higher-res images of the sites become available. If still upright, we'd perhaps be looking for a shadow, or if fallen over (as at the Apollo 11 site), we'd expect to see a bright rectangular object.

HOWEVER, in the opinion of the guy whose company made the flags out of nylon and sold them to NASA for $5.50 each.... they will have gone brittle, disintegrated and turned to "ashes". I suppose here might be a stain left, but maybe not even that.

Air & Space mag Finding Apollo

[mcaplinger]

HOWEVER, in the opinion of the guy whose company made the flags out of nylon...[/url]

With all due respect, it's not like this guy is a materials scientist or anything -- I doubt he has much idea of what vacuum exposure and temperature extremes will do to nylon (and I don't either, but I suspect the lunar environment is more benign than one might think -- most degradation of nylon on LDEF was from atomic oxygen, which is totally absent on the Moon.) We use nylon tie-wraps on instrument cables routinely.

Fading of the flag from UV exposure seems almost inevitable, though.