[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

I need a list of Discovery missions from each of the competitions since the Discover Program commenced. Not including Lunar Prospector, for which I have plenty of information already. Can anybody help me out?

At a minimum I just need a list, I guess, but other information or sources would be very useful as well, as eventually I have to go there as well.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Doug - a few members may still be around but the best place to start is LPI in Houston where the full set of minutes of the Apollo Site Selection Board and its associated bodies (Group for Lunar Exploration Planning, Science Working Panel) are preserved. Thousands of pages! I went through them page by page, and also through a set of binders of ASSB materials assembled by Don Wilhelms and left in the Branch History Collection at USGS Flagstaff.

The material you are talking about occupies half of my atlas. It includes dozens of EVA alternatives at places like Rima Prinz, Copernicus, Marius Hills, not to mention multiple potential landing sites around Hadley. I have sampling objectives but not specific EVAs at Littrow (this is not the same site as Taurus-Littrow). I have landing points but not EVAs for Davy. One unfortunate note, the Flagstaff material lacked some of the last few sites (including details of Tsiolkovsky) because they had been borrowed by Harrison Schmitt when I was there (and are still out). I'll have to put it in a second edition.

The ASSB stuff and lots more was rescued from the dumpster, literally, by Fran Waranius, then librarian at LPI (Lunar Science Institute as it was then). At the end of Apollo the wretched engineers who run JSC just stacked it all up to be thrown out. She shuttled her car back and forth between JSC and LSI with her trunk full of these unique goodies.

Anyway, hang on a bit and you'll have what you need.

Phil

[dvandorn]

hang on a bit and you'll have what you need.

Fantastic! And maybe -- just maybe -- Jack Schmitt has more than just Tsiolkovsky materials. Maybe he also has the details on the Littrow traverse plans, and the Davy traverse plans, as well. I'm as sure as I can be (without ever actually having seen them) that these must have been worked up by someone, and I'm hoping against hope that they still exist somewhere...

Do you have decent copies of the Apollo 13 traverse plans, by the way? I've seen very poor PDF scans of them -- the target point for 13 was about 300 to 500 meters further west than the point designed for Apollo 14, and Lovell was supposed to make a call during final approach as to whether it was better to land short (to the eventual Apollo 14 landing point, between Triplet and Doublet) and attempt a traverse east to Cone Crater, or land west (beyond Doublet) and attempt a traverse to the smaller, slightly less "fresh" Star Crater. Traverse plans were developed for both contingencies, plus another plan designed for landing west of Star Crater (which would have been about 1.5 to 2 km downrange of the Apollo 14 point). And after the abort, as they rounded the Moon, Lovell radioed back to the ground that he was "still looking for Star Crater," which makes you wonder whether Apollo 13 would have ever even *tried* to visit Cone.

As for myself, I never could figure out why they didn't target for a landing point in the valley between Cone Ridge and the Triplet craters -- it was relatively flat and smooth, and would have obviated the need for a 1.5 km trek to get to the most important sampling site there. It's not like Cone Ridge was so high as to pose an impact threat to the LM as it descended, and beginning with the very next flight, the descent profile was adjusted to allow for passing over *much* taller mountains on the way to the landing point. It would have been easy to do.

-the other Doug