Lunar Spacecraft Images, A place for moon panoramas, mosaics etc. Options

[Phil Stooke]

As promised in another thread... I thought all the images from Surveyor, Apollo etc. needed another place to go than the Mars Forum.

I will start the thing off with a link, not an image. I occasionally have images in Chuck Wood's Lunar Picture of the Day (LPOD) website, www.lpod.org.

This URL:

http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2005-05-25.htm

is my latest, a Clementine LWIR mosaic. The text accompanying the image explains how I made it. LWIR images from the PDS look useless but they can be made into very nice image strips. In most areas of the Moon they are the highest resolution images available, since the HIRES camera only functioned well over near-polar latitudes. So image junkies who want to see new scenery emerge from their computers can go wild!

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

There certainly is some low to medium scale relief on the Luna 9 horizon... but I'm not sure it's all that unusual for a mare area, if it happened to have a crater rim nearby. Nevertheless, as you can see here:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1341.pdf

I have argued that Luna 9 cannot lie at the position usually given for it, which would put it among Apollo 17-scale mountains. The most likely position is shown in that reference. It has to be far enough away from the mountains that they cannot be seen. The area I indicate does indeed contain wrinkle ridges, as well as craters of various sizes. Any combination of them could account for the horizon relief.

Phil

[ljk4-1]

Would it be possible to use the Surveyor solar panels as laser reflectors?

[djellison]

Would it be possible to use the Surveyor solar panels as laser reflectors?

I think the design of a laser reflector is that specifically so that it will return the incoming laser back in the direction it came from - that is the way they are optically designed. A solar panel would just reflect back out at the angle of the incoming laser. You would have to have the solar panel at exactly the right angle to reflect the light back to the source - an almost impossible task.

Doug

[Bob Shaw]

I think the design of a laser reflector is that specifically so that it will return the incoming laser back in the direction it came from - that is the way they are optically designed. A solar panel would just reflect back out at the angle of the incoming laser. You would have to have the solar panel at exactly the right angle to reflect the light back to the source - an almost impossible task.

Doug

Doug:

Although the panel would not be nearly so reflective as proper LRRR blocks, they ought to reflect sunshine reasonably well. Depending on the orientation of the panel (just one, the other is an aerial) I suspect that at either sunrise or sunset you might get an Iridium-like flare from the surface. Iridium panels must be about three or four times the surface area, however, and are a quarter of a million miles closer to us - but they *do* reach minus magnitudes!

It'd all depend on the orientation of the spacecraft, the position of the Moon, etc, etc, and the whole event, if visible at all, might only be seen over small parts of the Earth's surface at a time. Still, if somebody can work it out, it might be worth looking at as an advanced amateur observational project, much like the attempts to discern the shapes of asteroids etc by grazing occultations.

Bob Shaw