LRO development Options

[jamescanvin]

Just read this interesting article about LRO

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28apr_lro.htm

"This is the first in a string of missions," says Gordon Chin, project scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "More robots will follow, about one per year, leading up to manned flight" no later than 2020."

One per Year? Is this just wishful thinking or have any tentitve plans been mentioned for follow up missions after LRO? If the next one is going to be 2009/10 then I guess some desisions about it will have to be made fairly soon.

James

[Phil Stooke]

Alex, you can't really say that Clementine 'resolved' the Apollo sampling sites - which in effect are only as big as the scoop or the rock which was picked up. What you can say is that we know which Clementine UVVIS pixel the sampling site is in. So the multispectral characteristics of that pixel can be described and searched for elsewhere.

My LPSC abstract (print-only, as I can't be there - look at the moon section under 'print-only) discusses this topic.

Here's an example. This is the Luna 24 landing area. If L24 was 10 km off its predicted location it could lie on the higher albedo unit at lower left or on Fahrenheit ejecta, or on a mare ridge (though that's not likely to differ chemically from its surroundings). THe grid is 0.25 degrees. The image is from the Apollo 15 panoramic camera.



Phil

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Alex, you can't really say that Clementine 'resolved' the Apollo sampling sites - which in effect are only as big as the scoop or the rock which was picked up.

Given your knowledge of the subject, Phil, I wouldn't be surprised if you've read the Blewitt et al. paper. However, for those who haven't, Blewitt et al. have a different definition of "sampling sites."

The authors state, "Apollos 11, 12, and 14 and Lunas 16, 20, and 24 sampled either single points or small areas around the landing site. Individual sampling locations for these missions cannot be reliably separated in the Clementine images. However, the availability of the lunar roving vehicle on the Apollo 'J' missions (15, 16, and 17) greatly extended the range of surface operations. We are thus able to resolve the majority of the sampling stations at these landing sites in images collected by Clementine."

For the Apollo "J" missions, Blewitt et al. further write, "Boxes of 3 X 3 pixels were averaged for most stations. At a few locations where two stations were close together, slightly larger boxes were used to average the two. The data set includes eight stations at Apollo 15, seven at Apollo 16, and 18 (including rover stations) at Apollo 17."

This post has been edited by AlexBlackwell: Feb 9 2006, 07:13 PM