Targets for LRO Options

[PhilHorzempa]

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

[jmknapp]

And when the place will be in total darkness.

Ah--of course.

I made an animation of the LRO passes over the Apollo 11 site, using the "mission baseline v8" data given at http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/downloads.html. That baseline was for the original launch date of July 17, & so is about 1 day ahead of schedule. I just figured out how to add fixed points like the Apollo sites to the map projection & this is a first cut:

http://cboh.org/~jmk/lro_apollo11.mpg (54MB mpg file).

I put in all 50 primary LRO targets into the model, but only the handful visible on these ~2 orbits come up.

Joe

[Paul Fjeld]

I made an animation of the LRO passes over the Apollo 11 site, using the "mission baseline v8" data given at http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/downloads.html.

They updated the file to v10. It looks like it tracks pretty closely with the imaging data now.

[jmknapp]

They updated the file to v10. It looks like it tracks pretty closely with the imaging data now.

I downloaded the v10 files and indeed it tracked well, differing from the position given by http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/whereislro/ by only a few minutes. BTW, the "Where is LRO" site now seems to be gone (check link). So the question becomes "Where is Where is LRO?"

I hear that up-to-date SPICE kernels are provided to the various centers on a daily basis but those aren't available to the public. That contrasts to, say, MRO, where updated files are continually posted to the NAIF public website, including both planned and as-flown instrument pointing files (so-called CK kernels). Cassini also does this. My understanding is that the older programs (particularly Cassini, being an old-school big budget project) were more committed to this. In Cassini's case, they even provide "science plan" kernels containing text information about the type and purpose of observations, correlated with instrument command sequences.

Eventually the pointing and trajectory files will be posted to the PDS, but only after 8 months or something like that. So near real time for LRO looks to be a no go, as far as the public is concerned.

[Paul Fjeld]

I have no idea how much effort it takes to keep going something like "Where is LRO." I would think it would be trivial: just point some telemetry or tracking data at an automatic web thingy and off you go.

I wish NASA would, as a matter of course, maintain an up to date data stream of a mission's state vector and attitude. They could have a standard web protocol and each mission's data folks would plug those 9 numbers in with a time stamp (every minute or second) and we could all do with it what we wanted. We would know where pics were taken from instantly and, where there are interesting mission events, simulate them if we have the skill or interest. Planetariums could fly along with some missions - landers would be especially fun to follow in "real" time.