Targets for LRO |
Targets for LRO |
Apr 6 2007, 09:41 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 172 Joined: 17-March 06 Member No.: 709 |
You can imagine this to be a companion thread to the one requesting suggestions
for MRO targets on Mars. The LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) is set to launch in a little over a year from now. There was to a be a site selection workshop in May 2007, next month, but I see now that it has been cancelled. Therefore, it appears that it is up to us, the UMSF Community to take up the baton and help NASA out. It was done for New Horizons at Jupiter and was very productive. So, what are the sites that you would like to see imaged at 0.5 meter resolution by LROC, LRO's High-Resolution camera? My first suggestion would be to re-photograph the Surveyor 1 landing site to compare it with the images obtained by Lunar Orbiter 3. My second suggestion would be to photograph the Surveyor 6 landing area. This should image S-6 itself, but even more interesting, it may capture images of Surveyor 4, which should be only a mile or so away. This would help to determine whatever happened to S-4, which abruptly stopped transmitting just short of touchdown. Another Phil |
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Apr 8 2007, 07:20 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
Oh, of course, Phil -- that's exactly what I meant. It's those relatively few things that you mention (mostly special features and things like block population counts) that lend themselves to the very high resolution offered by LRO.
When you consider that LRO is designed primarily to support future manned lunar operations, it's instructive to remember that while most Apollo landing sites had imagery available at between 1 and 3 meter resolution, some of the later sites (particularly Hadley) had much lower-resolution imagery available pre-flight. I believe the best Hadley imagery prior to Apollo 15 was at 22-meter resolution, and was obtained by LO IV. And that photogeologists, straining to bleed data out of imagery that just didn't contain it, were capable of badly mis-identifying small landforms as volcanic when they were primarily impact-related (as with the 3- to 5-meter resolution images used to plan the Apollo 16 landing at Descartes). All I'm trying to do is make sure we don't forget lessons learned, here, when it comes to lunar geologic investigations. On a world where erosion and landscape modification is now extremely slow, but which has been almost completely gardened, vertically mixed (and somewhat horizontally mixed) right at the surface, you have to carefully select targets which will actually give you greater insights with very-high-resolution imagery. (Remember, Apollo astronauts had a hard time determining rock types, even when they held the rocks in their hands, because they were usually very dust-covered. John Young on Apollo 16 quipped that one rock was so dust-covered that it "defied description." If you can't tell anything about a rock when you hold it in your hand, how much are you going to be able to tell about it at 50-cm resolution?) And, just to add my voice to the chorus, yes -- Ina is a definite must for detailed imagery. It's one of those places where the very high resolution might provide some real answers... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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