Yutu Route Map Options

[Phil Stooke]

First route map! I will keep it going, mostly on LROC images, as I need it for a future project. I am still working on an accurate scale.

Phil

[fredk]

Yes, that's what I meant - if you knew the relative separation of the L and R rover cameras, then you can find the distance to the lander. I know information is sparse with this mission. But it may be possible to measure the L/R separation from a lander photo of the rover at known distance, or simply by comparing the L/R separation to the total width of the rover, if that's known reasonably well.

Knowing the L/R separation of the rover cameras (orthogonal to their optical axes), then it's a simple matter of trig to convert the measured parallax between the lander and the distant horizon (effectively at infinity) to the lander distance.

(Maybe this is what you meant Paolo - without an absolute direction reference, we could not do this, since the L/R optical axes may not be parallel. But we do have such a reference, given by features on the distant horizon in the images.)