Great work!

AMEN!...I "cut my planetary science teeth" on JPL TR-32-1023, Surveyor 1 Mission Report, Volume II, Science Rsults (Somebody later borrowed it and I never got it back... grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr). To say I have a soft spot for the Surveyor data is an understatement.

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I have had this happen quite a few times. It seems when ever I loan out a rare book, it grows legs and runs off....

Isn't that how rare books are acquired in the first place?
No, wait, that's how they become rare.

Despite the wonderfulness of teh internets, a book is so much more...
Over the years, I have lost a few gems, but have gained a few as well from friends moving or whatever. So Kharma=0.

I commend you on your hard work and excellent results. I do have one
request, however. I have longed to see more of the terrain around Surveyor 7.
All that has been available over the years has been the "periscope" view of
a slice of the surrounding hilly terrain, a small distance North of Tycho.
Could you post a sneak preview of a Surveyor 7 panorama that shows more
of the distant, interesting terrain around that lander?


Another Phil

You mean like this?

Phil

Click to view attachment

UNNEEDED QUOTE REMOVED. RULE 3.5

The view is tremendous!

A thousand thanks for that panorama of Surveyor 7's lunar home.

I found intriguing the view in the mirror, as well as the large rock
near one of Surveyor 7's footpads.

Another Phil

Interpreting the Moon surface:

The moon regolith has no marks of aeolian erosion. It is interesting to compare it with ones with aeolian erosion (Earth and Mars). The surface looks like that this was punctured by a great amount of micrometeorites.

Nothing smooth surface but porous surface. The surface has no any sharps angles, the hills are curved, it is due that there has no erosion that makes the surface to be rougher and also it has very low gravity that does make the surface to have a sharper angle.

Also, the moon colors are monotonous: white and black, aren't?

Rodolfo

Actually, there IS erosion on the Moon, and it is that erosion which has removed its sharp corners -- namely, that same slow but continuous rain of high-speed micrometeoroids which has very gradually but consistently pulverized the surface, as it does on all airless and nonchanging worlds. The lack of sharp corners is due to the Moon's lack of geological activity, for the last several billion years, that might thrust up new surface features or fissure old ones with faults. The place has been literally "ground down" for eons. This is something which in retrospect should have been obvious to everyone from the beginning, but doesn't seem to have struck most scientists until Ranger 7 provided the first close-up views of lunar features and revealed all the Moon's smaller craters to be blunted and eroded.

And, yes, it is virtually colorless -- which is why the patch of "orangish soil", which turned out to be beads of volcanic glass, so startled the Apollo 17 astronauts.

Well... there *are* sharp and craggy features on the Moon, but they're at relatively small scales. There are tons of angular, sharp-edged rocks up there, ejected from relatively fresh craters. And there are new craters being made most every day, of various (usually rather small) sizes, that have pretty sharp rims. But because the vast majority of the rocks and craters have been softened by millennia of impact erosion, such sharp features do tend to stand out (and were immediately noticeable by the Apollo crews).

And there are colors on the Moon beyond the small patch of orange soil found at Taurus-Littrow. In overall coloration, the highlands have a very slight reddish tinge, while the maria have a very slight bluish tinge. And there are deposits of volcanic and impact glasses that are more brightly colored -- greens, yellows, oranges, reds and golds -- that occur on the surface in such small areal extents that they are only visible at small scales. (And it wasn't just the Apollo 17 crew that found colored glasses -- the Apollo 15 crew found light green glasses coating some rocks. But the coloration was so subtle that, while Irwin spotted it immediately, Scott remained convinced until he saw the samples back on Earth that the greenish cast was a function of the sun visors.)

These sharp and colored features are so subtle and relatively uncommon that the overall appearance of the lunar surface is, as you say, of an almost entirely colorless, softened gray expanse. But the overall impression isn't absolute, and on a planet the size of the Moon, you can find an exception to just about every rule.

-the other Doug

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey went for the old-fashioned craggy Moon, despite
knowing better by then. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about how the Moon's mountains
were smooth due to cosmic erosion in his 1964 Time-Life Science book Man and
Space, which he did in a moonlighting capacity while working with Stanley Kubrick
on developing the film. So they knew, but they went with 1960s pre-Apollo audience
expectations of the Moon. A little disappointing considering how often 2001 is touted
as being so accurate.

They did the same thing with the Discovery spacecraft, choosing aesthetics over
accuracy by not having any large vanes on the vessel which would be necessary
to remove excess heat from the nuclear engines. It made the ship look like it had
wings and that would have reduced the "coolness" factor of its look. So they
decided to let Discovery look cool while in reality it would have melted into a
radioactive pile of metal slush from all the heat buildup. Or would it have
exploded?

http://www.palantir.net/2001/

Has anyone out there in UMSF-land tried to stitch together mosaics from the
digital Lunar Orbiter photos that are now available from the USGS?

The images can be found at

http://cps.earth.northwester.edu/LO/index.html



Another Phil

Another Phil:

Your URL got truncated:

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

The second 'n' got left out of 'northwestern'!

Interesting link, though...

Bob Shaw

I've got a few of the interesting Tif's coming down - I might have a play later.

Doug

Thought I'd have a bit of a play - and to be honest, I'm sure these images have been presented a thousand times before - but pretty pictures are pretty pictures

This is from LO3, two frames stitched from their scanning process.

Doug

Beautiful.

It's interesting that the Lunar Orbiters were phototelevision systems. I think that's the only time the Americans used that technology, but the Russians loved it. Somehow though, the Russian PTU images were always pretty messed up. I know from Zond-8 that they had splendid cameras (those were film-return missions). But when they tried to develop and scan the images, they were scratched up and had pretty bad contrast. I've played a little with the Mars-5 images, and you can make nice pictures, but it takes work.

The Lunar Orbiter photo system was borrowed practically without any change from our Samos film-scanning reconnaissance satellites (and I believe there was some fuss at the time about the fact that we might be revealing the details of the latter to the Soviets, although I don't know what else we could have done).

Great work on the LO3 image!

There is another source of digitally scanned Lunar Orbiter photographs
located here.

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...statusmaps.html


As you will notice, there is a clickable map of the Near Side and one for the Far Side
of the Moon at that site. Is it possible to produce a stitched mosaic of part of the Far
Side utilizing some of the Lunar Orbiter frames listed on that map? My favorite
sectors would be Mare Orientale, the area around the Korolev basin, as well
as the area near the Apollo basin.

In addition, back at the original site, listed earlier at

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

it would be interesting to see a stitched mosaic of the high resolution frames, from
Lunar Orbiter 3, of one of the candidate Apollo landing sites. The Lunar Orbiters
produced such magnificent photographs, but, I believe, have not been appreciated
recently because, for so long, they were not available in a digital format. Now that
we are headed back to the Moon, perhaps they will be utilized once again to prepare
for future landings, even in the age of the LRO.


Another Phil

Ah, interesting. The Russians also had a phototelevsion camera (called Baikal) in some early Zenit satellites, but got rid of it. Nothing beats film return for quality. Well maybe some of the modern 100,000 element push-broom cameras do, but I believe we still keep a few film return satellites in orbit for special purposes.

There's a lot on this in NASA's official 1977 history of Lunar Orbiter, "Destination Moon". I also remember reading about it somewhere more recently, but I can't remember the damned source -- it might well be JBIS, given their detailed coverage of space history.

There is always the LPI's "Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon," available online at:

Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon

-the other Doug

40 years ago today is the anniversary of Surveyor 1, the first soft landing on the moon. BBC article

FTFA:

The Surveyor 1 craft landed at 0617 GMT in the Ocean of Storms, about 590 miles (950 km) from where Luna 9 came down.

On the Honeysuckle Creek web page are to be found some terrific MP3s of off-air recordings of the landing and the first images, Jack King doing his stuff. The BBC fired up in the middle of the night (an unknown thing in the 1960s) and I saw the first images 'Live from the Moon' as the caption read.

Happy days:

http://honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/...pollo/Surveyor/

Bob Shaw

Yep. I stayed up all night for it myself (in Missouri). I rmember how delighted everyone was -- after the travails with Ranger -- that this time they'd succeeded on the first try and the Lunar Curse was apparently really broken. I also remember how lousy that first 200-line photo of the footpad was -- although the shower of horizon views that came in a little while later was much better.

I also stayed up all night to get TV coverage of the Viking 1 landing -- but, incredibly, the TV networks didn't bother to cover it live on the West Coast! I was only able to get live coverage of the landing from one 30-second announcement on the radio, and I had to wait about 2 hours for "The Today Show" to show the first photos from the surface. I have no idea why the networks thought no one would be interested in that -- whereas 21 years later they drowned us in Pathfinder coverage.

Bruce:

Viking 1 landed in mid-afternoon in the UK, and the BBC covered it as well as they could - I can still remember seeing that first 'letterbox' image of the footpad. They apologised for the picture being in B&W, but that made no odds so far as I was concerned, as I only had a B&W TV!. The papers here gave it good coverage, too - right down to a spoof advert from Cadburys (the food company), announcing that proof of intelligent life on Mars had been found (a faked-up image of a packet of Smash instant mashed potato, as promoted by the Smash Martians in TV ads!).

Bob Shaw

I detect another case of Topic Drift!

I too recall Viking 1. I was living at the last place on the road on northern Vancouver Island, Winter Harbour. This was back in my bush hippie days, you understand. Now I'm an urban hippie. We lived in a wood house without a TV, but there was one just up the hill in the local one room school. Luckily my wife was the teacher so I had access to it. I snuck up there to watch the TV news and got to see the first image release. I was still there when the first Voyager images of the Galilean satellites were released, but by then we had a TV with the world's crummiest reception at home.

Phil

I noticed a sequence of photos from the Apollo 12 mission that might make an
interesting mosaic. These appear to be part of a pan taken by the astronauts near
a small crater (named Block) that is inside the Surveyor crater.

These photos are from the Apolo Image Gallery, which is part of the Apollo Archive.
Go to this link -

http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html

Go to the Apollo 12 collection and scroll down to EVA 2, and
specifically, to image AS12-48-7145, which shows Surveyor 3, even though
the caption does not mention that.

It appears that the pan starts at AS12-48-7140 and continues through to -7147.
I am not proficient enough to stitch these together, but I believe that someone
in the UMSF community could perform such magic.


Another Phil

You mean like this?

Phil

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Phil S. - That is exactly what I mean! Thanks.

A few thoughts about those mosaics.

First, they give one a better "feel" for how close the Apollo 12 LM landed
to Surveyor 3.

Second, they give a good benchmark to compare to Surveyor 3's own mosaics
of the interior of Surveyor Crater produced in 1967.

Third, they show just how steep was the landing spot of the Apollo 12 LM.
It seems to sitting right on the rim of Surveyor Crater, tipping a bit more than
other photos indicate.


Another Phil

Actually, the apparent tilt of Intrepid is an illusion because of its proximity to the edge of the scene. Even the best lenses can introduce distortions near the edge of the scene.

According to every other source (including the LM's guidance system), Intrepid landed almost completely flat, almost no pitch and roll excursions. The landing point was indeed only about 5 meters beyond the lip of the Surveyor crater, and had Pete landed her just a little bit shorter than he did, she would have ended up on a significant slope. As it was, there was barely room for unloading the ALSEP.

But yes, these pans do give a very good comparison to the Surveyor pans. Especially nice is the detail it shows in Block Crater... very nice. Thanks for finding these, Phil!

-the other Doug

Actually, I didn't find them, I made them. I have assembled every pan from Apollos 11, 12 and 14, and a selection from the three remaining missions. One day I might get them up on my website. Some of my pans look a bit distorted because I have made exact fits at each seam instead of doing what many people have done in the past (just feathered the boundaries). I will post some here.

Phil

On Apollo 12 there are those well know images taken from Surveyor looking back up the slope to the LM. But I've never seen any from the LM area into the crater showing Surveyor. The closest I've been able to find is possibly this panorama... where just poking up from the shadowed interior, just above the near side sunlit lip of the crater is something that looks like the solar panel (on top of the mast... which is below the lip). Don't know if that's it, but it looks like a hard edges of the right shape.

http://moonpans.com/vr/apollo12_lm.htm

(You need quicktime to view the 360 pan)

I thought Phil found them in an ally under the red sky.... (if there are are any other Dylan fans, you might figure out what I am quoting).

Hmm... am I the little boy or the old man?

Anyway, here's one such pan from EVA 1, Station 2 on Apollo 15. Compare it with the version on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and you will see the interruption in the middle (caused by the astronaut stumbling on the steep slope) is wrongly represented on ALSJ. The tracks don't connect properly.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Yes, that's the Surveyor in that pan. I've only seen two images of the Surveyor Crater, which include the Surveyor, taken from the LM landing site, both taken during EVA-1 pans. The one you linked is the better of the two, you can actually make out not only the solar panel and antenna (which were in sunlight), but also the triangular shape of the landing gear structure. The Sun was only about 5 or 6 degrees above the horizon during Apollo 12's first EVA, so the shadow of the crater rim fell about one-third of the way down Surveyor's antenna/solar panel mast.

The other image, from approximately the same perspective, was taken with a higher F-stop and the shadowed portion of the crater shows much less detail. In that picture, only the solar panel and antenna are visible, you can't see anything of the landing gear structure.

Of course, the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than the film stock used during Apollo (or any film stock, for that matter). When Pete Conrad took three steps to clear the LM and look back into the Surveyor Crater, just after he stepped onto the surface, he could clearly see the entire probe, even though most of it was in shadow. (It was illuminated by light backscattered from the opposite, sunlit crater wall.) That's why he cackled, almost immediately after setting foot on the surface, "Guess what I see sitting on the side of that crater?"

-the other Doug

Definitely the old man...I'm not saying you're old, but he lived in the moon, so that would explain your "reprocessed" lunar images.

Here's a map of the lunar south polar region with a few sites added. LEx was a lander which competed for the LRO spare capacity opportunity eventually won by LCROSS. The background is the new radar image of the south pole from Arecibo, courtesy Campbell et al.

I have posted a version of this elsewhere (I can't find it now), but this version is corrected from that earlier one.

Phil

Click to view attachment

hey all,

after ages of lurking (doesn't everyone say that?) i thought i would finally try and contribute something. the moon certainly isn't my speciality, but i've had fun with these images nonetheless.

while i was achiving some data at work i came across a microfiche from the apollo 15 metric mapping camera, which i hadn't seen before. fortunately for me and my scanner they are all online, with a lot of other apollo stuff, at lpi - have a look, it's a treasure trove.

i'm sure there are people here who can do the images more justice than i can, but i've had a bit of play around with the apollo 15 set anyway because i hadn't seen it used anywhere on here.

there are a few more on my webpage, but here's a low-res panorama (for me to learn how to post images if nothing else!)

apollo 15 rev 4 panorama
Click to view attachment

cheers,
pete

Very nice Pete, and welcome aboard UMSF!

For those wondering - that's Pete, previously seen here:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4139



Doug

Litte gift for all dissapointed by Smart-1 and Kaguya's fuzzy images.

Click to view attachment
Mariner 10 - one day after launch (November 1973).
Image FDS0002659

Click to view attachment
Mariner 10 - one day after launch (November 1973).
Image FDS0002667

.. and more

Click to view attachment
Mariner 10 - one day after launch (November 1973).
Image FDS0004637

Click to view attachment
Mariner 10 - one day after launch (November 1973).
Image FDS0002267

UMSFers,

Where can I find the complete image library of the Surveyor 3 mission?

(it returned ~10K images, i would like the hi res, hopefully calibrated, -etc...)

Does this exist on-line or do I need to order/buy it?

tnx !

It exists only in hard copy. You have to go to the LPI library, search the negatives and scan them.

Phil

"Where can I find the complete image library of the Surveyor 3 mission"

Surveyor data was returned by slow-scan analog transmission and recorded on analog tape. A very small amount (punched card computing, almost no hard disk capability... this was 1966-68 or so) was digitized and image processed to sharpen and improve analog ghosting, etc, or for photometric/colorimetric analysis and reported in published papers. I doubt any of that exists anywhere findable and restorable and I have to assume no original analog data tapes of Surveyor images survive, or so close to none they scientifically don't count.

Images were recorded by some sort of data-recorder camera that had essentially a high precision slow-scan TV, and the slowly rendered single-frame image raster was exposed directly onto film.

What I'd like to know is the location and status of such FIRST GENERATION film negatives. They are the primary and original data record.

They would be either at JPL or at the National Space Science Data Center at Goddard.

Phil

Cool images, Peter. Mariner 10 really did have an incredible imaging system. It was the first planetary spacecraft with a vidicon system that used a blast of light to get rid of after-images (Viking and Voyager also did this), which makes the image quality much better.

I will say that the Kayuga images we have seen from the science cameras have been quite sharp - we should see more in the future, since Kayuga began its official science mission in the last few days. The images we have been seeing are mostly from the engineering cameras and the HDTV camera, which is there for PR purposes.

Apollo 15 landing site observed by Mariner 10. Mount Hadley and Delta Hadley are clearly visible.

Click to view attachment
Image FDS0002285 (November 1973)

Phil & Ed

thanks for the replies...it just seems short sighted not to transfer these historic data sets to a digital format.


I will gladly fill out the grant papers to do this multi-year task!

cheers!

The Surveyor images are archived on negatives at LPI, along with numerous photos of assembled mosaics, many of which come with frame index number overlays. They would help you locate individual frames. But it's a bit of a mess. Surveyor was quickly overshadowed by Apollo and people lost interest - of course, there wasn't an amateur image processing community in those days.

To my mind the most dramatic and interesting early product to make with Surveyor 3 images would be a wide-angle panoramic view shot in the first couple of days after landing. The systematic high resolution imaging I used for my pan was shot late, with high sun and no shadows, so it's very bland. There might be some good coverage at high resolution from early in the mission as well.

Phil