Unmanned landing sites from LRO, Surveyors, Lunas, Lunakhods and impact craters from hardware impacts Options

[dvandorn]

I figured it was time to begin a thread like this, especially since some of us may still be looking for the Surveyor III retro motor casing (assuming the bright dot to the north of the landing site isn't it).

We ought to be seeing some of the other Surveyors fairly soon, I would think. We know most of their locations pretty accurately. Again, I think there is a lot to be gained, both from scientific and engineering standpoints, from detailed imaging of the Surveyor VII landing site, just to mention one. And I really want to see how visible the Lunakhod tracks are as opposed to the MET and LRV tracks.

So... until we begin to see images of other unmanned hardware (or the craters caused by same), we could always discuss comparisons of Surveyor III surface imagery to the new LROC images of its landing site here. I'm especially taken by how you can resolve many of the blocks in Block Crater in the LROC image, which gives you a good feel for the explosive nature of the ejecta and roughly where in the ejecta plume a given block might have come from. Might be interesting/useful to apply this information to the samples taken at that location.

-the other Doug

[Phil Stooke]

I've been trying to get the word out about this, but generally there is less interest in such corrections. You know how it is - the story about a celebrity scandal is on page 1, the correction is on the back page.

The think that really concerned me was how the story turned into a 37-year-old mystery about a lost rover. That was all created by people trying to write eyecatching headlines. But it becomes very embarrassing.

I found what I thought was the Lunokhod in an image - I knew as any of us would have that it was in that specific image, from the coordinates. I saw the dark track and the dark spot but didn't notice the fainter track leading up to the bright spot - I had already cropped the image around the dark spot. But it was about a location in an image. It gets turned into finding a location on the moon, as if it was lost. So now Russians working on this are saying - 'it wasn't lost, we knew where it was all along'. Quite rightly. And people are asking me 'how do you lose a rover on the moon?' - but of course that didn't happen.

Anyway I did a story with AOL yesterday which may help.

Phil