Ranger, Surveyor, Luna, Luna Orbiter, 1960s Missions to Earth's Moon Options

[Bob Shaw]

Have any of the serious experts on this board ever sorted out any 1960s images? I'm thinking of the Surveyor panoramas (in the 60s they did it with photos pasted onto the inside of half-spheres!) and the way that the exposure dropped off toward one corner, making a horrible patchwork effect. Or them lines and spots on the Lunar Orbiter images...

Most of the NASA mission data should be available as digital source material, and thus could be manipulated, though I suspect that getting anything 'real' from Soviet missions would be a bit of a chase!

Any thoughts?

[Phil Stooke]

What a coincidence that you should ask this question! As it happens, lots of things are happenning here. I assume people know about:

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

and

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...erDigitization/

and

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/

and

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_atlases/

(Lunar Orbiter images, plus some maps and Apollo stuff - browse and full res)

For Surveyor, the images were horrible, as you say. As far as I know nobody has ever been foolish enough to try to do anything with the full panoramas... until now. I scanned assembled pans at LPI in Houston, USGS in Flagstaff and LPL in Tucson. I am painstakingly fixing all the problems to create large (10000 to 15000 pixel wide) digital pans for each site. Surveyors 1, 3 and 7 are done, 5 is half done, six next year. This is a job that would drive you nuts if you were not already so challenged, so I only do one a year. This is being done for my International Atlas of Lunar Exploration, to be published in 2007. The atlas also covers all lunar missions including Soviet ones (e.g. maps of photo coverage from orbiters, day by day lunokhod route maps), and site selection for ranger, surveyor and apollo (the latter a fully illustrated account from the minutes of the meetings). So lots of things are being done.

Phil Stooke