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]

If this is Luna 18 it obviously landed - rather than crashed - but presumably landed hard enough to do some serious damage to the spacecraft, especially its communication system.

The difference in shadow lengths between the two objects is related to local slopes - Luna 18 (my candidate for it anyway) is on a crater wall sloping toward the sun.

Phil