[X] My Assistant

[ngunn]

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000856/
(If this is already somewhere else on this forum please excuse and delete.)

[edstrick]

I just love Phil's Surveryor panoramas, cause I cut my teeth on the JPL TR series mission reports. Gobs of memories.

Regarding the comments about the softness of most of the terrain. The highlands are a "megabreccia" and while a lot of the rock was well-sintered in hot ejecta blankets and some comes from melt-sheets, A lot of the rocks are heavily shocked or poorly-reassembled and rather (as I vaguely recall from Apollo 16) friable. The result is that stuff on the ejecta blanket is probably rather more crumbled in the course of ejection and fallout and impact that we'd assume from smaller, closer-to-everyday-life explosive events.

You want a spectacularly nasty place to land, look at the Lunar Orbiter V images of Tycho's floor..... the soles of my feet hurt just looking at those pics...

[dvandorn]

You want a spectacularly nasty place to land, look at the Lunar Orbiter V images of Tycho's floor..... the soles of my feet hurt just looking at those pics...

Well, yeah -- but I'll point out that the same Lunar Orbiter V images of the Tycho area show the Surveyor VII landing site. From orbit, it looks like a complete mess of ropy ridges and sheer cliffs. But from the ground, it becomes apparent that the slopes are, on average, far more gentle than they appear from above.

Our Moon always seems to look rougher and more rugged from orbit than it does from the ground. I don't know if that's a lesson to be learned, or a trap to be avoided, as we head out to explore other Solar System bodies.

-the other Doug