[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

Hi, Bob!

Other Doug, do you have any information about things like landing targets at Hadley Or did it not get that far?

Phil

[dvandorn]

It didn't get so far as to have a design of EVAs or a specific targeted landing point, but the sampling objectives were (as I recall):

1 -- recovery of Apollo 15 equipment, for sale back on Earth to help defray the cost of the flight.

2 -- rocks from the supposedly volcanic craters of the North Complex (Pluton, Icarus and Chain).

Since Harvest Moon would have been limited to two walking traverses, I'd have to think they would target the landing site to the north of the Apollo 15 landing point, allowing one walking traverse to the south for purposes of scavenging the original mission's equipment, and a second walking traverse to the North Complex.

I know what a lot of you are thinking -- why not just recharge the Rover's batteries and use it? The problem, of course, was that those batteries were not rechargeable and the Rover's EPS was not designed for refurbishment in-place. Taking the batteries out and replacing them would have been difficult, if not impossible. (That's the Rover's main power batteries. The LCRU batteries, that powered the comm unit and TV camera, *were* replaceable in flight.) Besides, collecting pieces of the Rover was one of the higher-priority sampling objectives.

-the other Doug

[garybeau]

I think the MER rovers will go down in history as two of the most successful robotic rovers. This is due mainly because of their freedom of mobility. If we are going to develop lunar rovers, we should at least keep this concept in mind.
If we go with a Sojourner style rover, is it going to be tied to the lander for communications?
What type of instrument suite is planned?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Phil is right -- I dug up all my material on all of the first-round Discovery lunar proposals, and while my printed stuff on Interlune-1 is unusually sparse (only 3 pages), there's no reference to it returning to the Apollo 15 site. But, if I remember correctly, there WAS a proposal for such a mission and Schmitt was involved in it -- I'll have to dig into my stuff on CD-ROM to look for more on this. (Interlune-1 did involve one larger and one smaller rover, and it was indeed largely -- though not entirely -- aimed at prospecting for He-3. Schmitt is something of a maverick in lunar science -- he continues to hold not only that the Moon's polar hydrogen is captured from the solar wind rather than being water ice, but also that the giant-impact theory is wrong and the Moon was gravitationally captured by the Earth. He also continues to be a wild fan of He-3 mining.)

I also have, on paper, 10 pages on Murray's "Icy Moon Mission", 8 on Pele, 7 on Boynton's "Lunar Discovery Orbiter", and two on Diana (plus that quite detailed Aviation Week article on Diana, which is on my CD-ROM collection). All my descriptions of them were correct. Let me know if you want me to send this stuff to you, Phil. I also have (monomania has its points) a huge backlog of stuff on other lunar missions, both manned and unmanned, going back to the Ranger program -- including NASA's prioritized list of experiments for the cancelled Lunar Observer, and a very detailed description of the two smaller Lunar Scout orbiters that NASA, back around 1991, was tentatively planning to replace the Lunar Observer. Send me a specific request list and I'll try to meet it. Meanwhile I'll also sift my CD-ROM documents for more on the later lunar Discovery proposals. (I do remember that there were at least two proposals for lunar polar landers to examine the ice -- at least one being a rover -- and that a second Lunar Prospector was once proposed with instruments complementary to the first one.)

[MizarKey]

It also didn't help that the Harvest Moon people wanted to return the Apollo 15 crew itself to the Hadley-Appenine site, announcing that Scott, Irwin and Worden would fly the mission, and just after their announcement, the stamp scandal hit.  NASA was NOT going to allow Scott and his crew to fly in space for them again, much less support anyone who was going to use their skills to make profits from sending them back to the Moon.

-the other Doug

Doug, could you post some links to info about the 'Stamp Scandal' (in a new thread?), I don't remember hearing about it.

Eric P / MizarKey

[Phil Stooke]

Bruce - many thanks for this. I seem to have lost my old email from you - can you please email me at pjstooke@uwo.ca so we can work this out?

And for others,

http://www.explore-biography.com/scientist...avid_Scott.html

briefly recounts the stamp story. Actually it's rather dumb, but every now and then somebody has to be made an example of... or whatever.

Phil

[JRehling]

Doug, could you post some links to info about the 'Stamp Scandal' (in a new thread?), I don't remember hearing about it.

Eric P / MizarKey

All three of the Apollo 15 astronauts were part of a deal wherein they carried some postage stamps on the mission as part of their personal payload allotment. Then they sold them to a collector for a hefty profit when they returned. When this got out, it was pretty scandalous, since it was basically a personal cash profit courtesy of a very expensive US government project. Somewhat askew in ethics, but very, very bad in PR. None of the three ever flew in space again. (Of course, with only 2 Apollo missions left, it might have turned out that way anyway.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Sure, Phil. My new E-mail address is rmoomaw@sbcglobal.net.

Last night, I pretty much finished plowing through my CD-ROM documents, and have dug up four other lunar proposals sent to the later Discovery AOs (although this list can't be complete). First, in 1997, Michael Duke and William Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon teamed up for the "Lunar Ice" mission, in which a rover would have crawled around in the shadowed polar areas to look for ice.

Then Duke and Whittaker later went their separate ways. In 2000 Whittaker proposed Victoria -- an apparently souped-up version of that rover which would also have looked for Aitken Basin rocks -- while Duke proposed Moonraker, the initial version of his Aitken basin sample-return mission in which a single stationary lander would have raked up bits of Aitken material and returned them to Earth. (I have a fair amount of material on that -- he later simply doubled the landers to create his "Moonrise" NF proposal.)

Finally, we have "Polar Night", a mission proposed by P.G. Lucey of the Univ. of Hawaii for the next Discovery round after that, which would first have mapped polar ice deposits using radar, hydrogen abundance and temperature maps (sounds like LRO), and then launched 6 penetrators equipped with neutron and mass spectrometers into the discovered deposits to analyze the ice in detail. (There were -- I believe -- two lunar missions proposed for that AO, although it's possible that the other was a Mission of Opportunity. You'll recall that the ONLY Discovery proposal accepted for the abortive latest AO was another M.O.: Carlie Pieters' "MMM" near-IR mapping spectrometer, which will be added to India's lunar orbiter.)

This is the sum total of Discovery proposals I remember seeing -- except for that proposed follow-up to Lunar Prospector, equipped with complementary instruments such as an X-ray spectrometer, a mass spectrometer, and (I believe) a farside gravity-mapper subsat. I'm about to go through my files of stored letters to see if I can dig up the reference to that. (I also have a bit more on Inrerlune One -- including some pictures, a slightly more detailed experiment description, and the revelation that its project manager was none other than Michael Griffin.) A good deal of the stuff I've just mentioned is actually still on the Web, and I'll send you the URLs.

[dvandorn]

Doug, could you post some links to info about the 'Stamp Scandal' (in a new thread?), I don't remember hearing about it.

I'll reply in a new thread in the EVA forum for Manned Spaceflight.

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I finally found my super-sparse notes on that proposed Discovery reflight of Lunar Prospector (although I can't find which Discovery AO it was specifically proposed for). It was called "Lunar Star", masterminded by Alan Stern, and would actually have carried:

(1) X-ray spectrometer
(2) UV spectrometer
(3) Plasma spectrometer
(4) IR radiometer (to look for polar cold traps)
(5) Gravity subsatellite

You'll have to talk to him for any more data.

[MiniTES]

Jim Irwin's dream about following old tracks at Hadley-Appenine might *almost* have come true, then! 

(sigh)

That was actually Charlie Duke's dream about following tracks at Descartes.

[Phil Stooke]

Bruce very kindly provided me with quite a bit of information on lunar Discovery proposals, as I had asked at the start of this discussion. Thanks! I have condensed it into a table for my current project. As I rummaged around my own stuff I came across some things I had photocopied at either Flagstaff or LPI - probably the former. One was an item from "Results and proceedings of the lunar rover/mobility systems workshop", held at LPI, Houston on April 29-30 1992. One invited presentation by Paul Spudis (then at LPI) discussed a scenario for two small rovers or one big one to do in situ characterization of lunar resources. Two sites were considered, Mare Tranquillitatis at 4N, 38E, and the Apollo 15 site. The name for this mission series (this was to be just the first of a series) was Artemis (not to be confused with the moon base people). One version illustrated in the proceedings was a walking robot, with a route from the Apollo 15 LM to north complex, then west to the rille and south to Spur crater at Hadley Delta.

Some of Bruce's comments may have referred to this, which as it stands was not a Discovery mision as such. There are, of course, zillions of paper missions like these. I am interested in any and all I can find.

As an aside, some folks will know I am working on an Atlas of Lunar Exploration for Cambridge. I have now completed the first draft... and the editing is beginning. Phew!

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I've got quite a lot more coming for you, Phil -- it's already recorded, and all I have to do is find the time to send it to you. Tomorrow, if I can possibly manage it.

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks, Bruce! Anything relating to specific landing sites or surface activities is especially welcome.

Phil

[dvandorn]

Does anyone have addresses or contact information for members of the Apollo Site Selection Board (ASSB) or the Geology Lunar Exploration Panel (GLEP), which did most of the planning for the selected *and* unselected Apollo landing sites?

I know that Don Wilhelms refers, in his book "To a Rocky Moon," to a J-mission planned for the Davy crater chain. He speaks of it as if someone had done a first-take surface plan, including traverse plans and sampling objectives.

He also discusses sampling objectives identified for other proposed landing sites, such as Alphonsus, Copernicus, Censorinus, Marius Hills, Littrow (the H-mission site originally planned for Apollo 14, not the Apollo 17 Taurus-Littrow site), and even Tsiolkovsky. He even goes so far as to state that, as of February, 1970, the Apollo 14 crew was training for a landing at the Littrow landing site.

All of this implies that somewhere, there ought to be documentation of the sampling objectives and traverse plans worked up for the proposed Apollo landing sites that were not selected. And I would think that the members of the ASSB and/or the GLEP would be the best people to ask about it.

As for me, I would just like to see artist's representations of surface operations at these sites -- we know what the lunar surface looks like in general, and we have a fair idea of the topography of the unselected sites (since stereo imaging of the landing sites was a requirement for the later missions). In this age of CGI wizardry, it ought to be pretty easy to paint realistic pictures of what, for example, a LM landing about five kilometers away from the central peaks of Copernicus would have looked like...

-the other Doug