[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

This is a subject I brought up several years ago on Usenet, and I still have an interest in it.

There were several landing sites heavily scrutinized for Apollo landings. There were four alternate landing sites for the G mission, for example. There was an alternate landing site for Apollo 12. And there were landing site proposals for many places that never 'made the cut' for an actual mission. Several of these sites had detailed planning put into them, including traverse planning.

It seems to me that it is now possible, with our knowledge of how the lunar surface looks in general and of how major terrain features look in specific, to use CGI techniques to create panoramas from landing sites and traverse stops from Apollo missions that never flew.

For example, the Apollo 14 crew spent several months training for a landing at Littrow -- a site out on Mare Serenitatis about 45 km from the later Taurus-Littrow site -- which was designed to sample the dark mantling unit and to visit a wrinkle ridge. It was a nice H-mission landing site, available in late summer and early fall of 1970. (Had Apollo 14 flew later than this, the landing site would have been near the crater Censorinus -- for which similar detailed planning was done.)

There were also detailed plans made for Alphonsus, Davy, Gassendi, Copernicus and Tycho landings. All included a number of traverse plan concepts and sampling site recommendations.

I would really enjoy seeing these vistas that, for the roll of the dice, might have been seen by American moonwalkers in the 1970s.

I know that Phil Stooke is working on a book... any idea if we might see something like this in it..?

-the other Doug

[dvandorn]

I've heard the same thing, Bruce, but I've never heard exactly *what* about the Marius descent plan Scott found displeasing. Especially compared to the Hadley descent plan, which seemed to me to be a lot more dicey. I mean, at Hadley, they had to maintain a high, flat profile so they could clear 12,000-foot-tall Mt. Hadley, and then descend at a much steeper angle (something like 25 to 30 degrees, as compared to a 10 to 12 degree descent angle for previous landings) to reach the surface at a reasonably slow speed before the fuel ran out.

I know there are a lot of low domes as you approach the Marius landing point, but they can't have anything like the relief that Mt. Hadley and the associated massifs of the Appenine Front provided.

-the other Doug