I was told in this forum that the Surveyors did not have
the computer capacity to do many things on their own.

Was this one of those exceptions?

Makes one wonder if any of the other Surveyors also
tried to do one last task before expiring?

Until we can actually get an exoarchaeological team there
to study these old probes, can the LRO determine anything,
such as an unpredicted orientation, or will we just be lucky
enough to even see them on the lunar surface?

Phil:

Of course! I was describing the matter of the Surveyor solar panels in general, hence the plural 'panels'. The Apollo 12 panel is the only one where utterly accurate predictions could be made, other than best guesses...



I think it wasn't so much a commanded action by a lonely old computer so much as a twitch from a half-broken component or two, aided by a still-working solar panel.

The Sojourner story, that's another matter - it may have trundled around for a while after Pathfinder ceased to operate, bravely crying for it's parent! Maybe MRO will have a cPROTO mode developed which will resolve the little guy's position...

Bob Shaw

A rather bland image... it's the foreground of the Surveyor 6 post-hop panorama I'm working on. This extends to the right of the previous section. The footpad with its colour disk is at right bottom, with a big patch of disturbed soil. At left are dark streaks made by the thruster firing. A circular pit near the top is an imprint of a shock-absorber, and a pit half-seen at the top edge is a footpad imprint from the imitial landing.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Phil, admit it. You don't reprocess these images. You sneek up there in your "Apollo-B" module, slip your camera next to the Surveyor camera, and snap the pictures. The only editing is to remove your footprints!

Seriously, tremendous work!

You got it, Ted. The best part is, NASA is paying me $145 billion for the use of my spacecraft in 'the Vision', so now I can pay off my credit card.

Phil

This is the current state of the Surveyor 6 pan... the original is 11000 pixels long.

Can you tell which part is cleaned up and which I still have to do?

I'm working along the horizon in the middle right now.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Amazing masterpiece, Phil ... I admire your patience! (what about your Mars atlas project?)

Phil:

If you ever have time, would you consider talking through some of the processes you use? It'd be instructive to see how your work in progress actually takes place!

Bob Shaw

On the subject on the flashes some claimed to have observed on the Moon and Mars I always have thought those were phosphene flashes in the eyes of the visual observers due to darkness and the late hours they worked.
I think so especially since the few searches with photographic means yielded nothing, even when images were taken simultanously to a claim of a tranisent light, nothing could be seen on the plates.

Well, the problem with flashes and old-style photography was that the exposures were just too darn long, and the flashes way too short - but recently there *have* been observation made with video cameras showing meteor impacts on the Moon during well-known meteor showers.

There was an article in S&T a few years back which had some interesting arguments for the reality of the Mars flashes, too...

Bob Shaw

My work with Surveyor pans is very tedious and time-consuming. I told myself five years ago I would make a full clean pan of every Surveyor site. Now I tell myself I will never look at another Surveyor image as long as I live.

I work in Photoshop. In the better areas I can just select small areas and lighten or darken them. In general, though, the procedure is like this:

I use the polygon select tool to outline one individual frame from the pan. I copy it and paste it over itself.

I use feathered selections over dark areas to brighten them, and over light areas to darken them, adjusting to equalize contrast in each area as well. This removes the vile tonal gradients across many of the frames.

Then - the slowest part - I zoom in on the frame borders and clean up all the bad edges so the transition from frame to frame is invisible. Many small selections individually processed.

Finally, I remove reseau marks and other defects using a comination of noise filters in tiny selections over each flaw, and (less often) cutting an adjacent good patch and placing it over a larger flaw (dust specks on Surveyor 6 mirror, for instance).

Then I flatten it, back it up, and start all over again.

Phil

Oh yes you are right there, there was one such videofilmed one last year wasnt it?

Back to the subject of this thread I guess.
Great work on that old vidcon image Phil!

Well, Phil, I hope knowing that your work is extremely and thoroughly appreciated by people like me makes it worthwhile for you.

Though I imagine that, at the core of it, you're doing these for yourself, so you can see the Surveyor sites as they truly appeared.

But, whatever the reason you are doing it -- the work is appreciated.

-the other Doug

Phil, did you consider the use of a stitch program, at least for the slowest part of your work?

Replying to two messages from Dilo -

First, the Mars atlas is off in the future. I have to finish the moon one first! But when I have some spare time at home I play with other topics like maps of the rover routes, shape modelling of Comet Borrelly, or a rather nice cylindrical projection map of Comet Tempel-1 which I'll post one day... after the sources are public!

Second, a stitch program does not help me with the Surveyor pans. What I forgot to add was the source of my data - after all, you can't find Surveyor pans online. I searched the photo archives of LPI in Houston, LPL in Tucson and USGS in Flagstaff. It was a great privilege to be able to work in all those places. The material I scanned was made up of prints of the big mosaics assembled in the 1960s at JPL (the USGS mosaics were less satisfactory for this purpose)

So the mosaics were stitched - by hand - using individually projected hardcopy images, and then photographed years ago. I scanned prints of the photos of already assembled mosaics. What I have to do is remove the flaws in the mosaics. But stitch software would have nothing to contribute.

PS - this project is what academic tenure was created for! I've done nothing else for five years but teach and do this.

Oh, and OD, I do it for me, but I'm glad you appreciate it. One day this will all be on the web.

Phil

Thanks for details, Phil. Cannot wait for full-res, public release!
Many of us do space image processing only for personal satisfaction (and relax too, see here)...doing this for work (and be payed for this!) would by the dream of most uf us (for sure is my dream!)... so, in my opinion, you are very lucky man!

oh yeah - I forgot to mention I get paid to play!

Phil

...damn, this was my 1000th post and I didn't noticed!

Apollo 13 and SLA panels in flight - before the, er, problem!

http://www.w7ftt.net/apollo13.html

The same website mentions observations of Apollo 8 at 200,000 miles...

Bob Shaw

Now that was one hell of a shot. Way cool.

That is a cool shot. I had forgotten about the panels. These are all in quasi solar orbit now (right?). I assume that we didn't track them. Can we guess where they are?

The website noted above mentions that the SLA panels were rather bright whenever they caught the sun just so, but quite dim apart from that - this was in the days of film photography, so they eneded up with an 'average' brightness. These days, with video, the max brightness flashes might be picked up and would look pretty far from natural, coming from objects having a rotational period of a few seconds! The Apollo 13 spacecraft was in a non-return trajectory, as we all know, so presumably the S-IVB was too - and the SLA panels too. The S-IVB struck the Moon, but would have had a targetting 'burn' using unburnt residual fuel to bring it to an impact trajectory. The SLAs obviously didn't, so they may or may not have hit the Moon. The Apollo 12 S-IVB turned up again a few years ago, so I suppose it's entirely possible that the SLAs wandered round for a bit then hit the Moon years later.

Bob Shaw

Its likely that any panels that did a posigrade lunar flyby were flung into solar orbit, while ones that did a retrograde flyby may have lost enough velocity relative to Earth that they remained in a moon-crossing orbit (very unstable and unpredictable, long term)

The next installment of the Surveyor 6 pan. This is just above the last one, extending to the horizon.

The pit in the foreground is a footpad imprint from the initial landing. This is from after the 'hop'.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Here's a full resolution section from the Surveyor 6 panorama. The horizon southeast of the spacecraft.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Phil:

Is this image of any use to you? It's one I've been playing with, and I've been thinking of dropping it into your Tycho panorama...

Bob Shaw

(Eeek! 1500 posts! I ought to get out more...)

Yes, the Internet is making modern society bear a closer and closer resemblance to E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"...

Judging by the number of posts, I'm only half the man Bruce is... and just over half a Bob. Just over half a bob - let's say sixpence ha'penny. I can't afford to get out more - I gotta stay here and post-post-post!

Phil

(PS Bob - add a Surveyor to a pan if you like, I'd enjoy it. I have a pic like that somewhere too, I'll look it out.)

Internet posts are like eating chips out of a bag -- you don't realize how many you've done until it's too late. (I was just harshly reminded of this again this morning, when I got so wrapped up posting at this site and reading others without paying an attention to anything else that I ended up being half an hour later to an appointment.)

Which is online thanks to the very same Internet:

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html

Hmm - pringles.


Doug

This is pretty much why I'm skeptical about the whole Singularity concept. Rather than work hard to develop faster and better technology, people will tend to spend more time net surfing, reading fora, chatting, or park themselves on the couch to watch bad reality TV shows.

[quote name= quote in reply - removed
[/quote]

It's the machines - better known as Artilects - that will do all the
real work and benefit the most from the Singularity. Humans may
just have been the midwives in all this.

The Artilects may take care of us, ignore us, or get rid of us.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1

http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris/

Today's Space.com post includes an article featuring a chap by the name of Stooke...

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0603...ery_monday.html

Bob Shaw

[quote name= quote in reply - removed
[/quote]

Very unlikely sounding name. Must be a pseudonym

chris

I see Phil's LPSC talk on the great Lunar Lander Hunt has made Space.com: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0603...ery_monday.html . Personally, the one I'm still most interested in is Surveyor 4.

I should emphasize I only submitted a "print-only" abstract because I couldn't get to LPSC this year.

Phil

Phil:

I was intrigued by the (possible) Clementine Ranger impact image which accompanied the Leonard David article. It seemed to show that the dark ejecta blanket (perhaps 'dust blanket' would be a more accurate description) was quite large, of the order of half a kilometer. What are your views on this? And, indeed, going back to some previous comments about the dark tracks near the LM landing sites, why is the disturbed area darker at all (or is that just an IR artefact?)?

Bob Shaw

The possible Ranger 6 ejecta deposit is dark in thermal IR, meaning it's cool (and by extension, so am I), but in visible light it's bright. This like all fresh crater deposits may just be a texture effect.

We don't have a high res image here. Where we do - Rangers 7, 8, 9, Apollo 13, 14 SIVBs, Apollo 14 LM - the story is more confused. Generally there is a dark ejecta patch in visible, but Ranger 9 is bright and Apollo 14 SIVB has mixed bright and dark rays. It's not clear what is going on.

One problem is that the images my comments are based on are very different - Apollo pan and Hasselblad, Lunar Orbiter, Clementine IR. We would really benefit from having systematic coverage of all these sites at very high resolution, with similar illumination, from the same instrument. LRO should help with this.

Phil

Phil:

What about the sizes of the areas disturbed by the impact? I appreciate that high lateral velocity impacts are a case all to themselves, but most of the other impacts will, I'd assume, have been pretty well head-on. The S-IVBs and LM ascent stages may also have had some residual propellants which must have turned to gas on impact and presumably added to the distribution of debris. So how *big* an area of disturbance are we looking at? If a Ranger = half a kilometer, then an SIVB = ?

Do you remember the post-impact pictures in the National Geographic articles which covered V2 launches at White Sands? If the V2 nosecone wasn't blown off it came in with little in the way of braking, so it's impact velocity wasn't far off that of something hitting the Moon - and what you got was a 60 foot crater with an engine in it, and confetti. I presume that head-on impacts on the Moon would be like that, but that the grazing impacts by the LM ascent stage might be rather different.

Bob Shaw

And wouldn't the color/shading of the impact area also depend on what kind
of surface material the crashing spacecraft would dig up?

A little crude surface science could be done from these old versions of
Deep Impact, I presume?

We don't have a good sample, and the different sources of information may be detecting different things. Looking at the two SIVB impacts, Apollo 16 pancam images show disturbed areas about 1 km across (A13) and maybe 4 km across (A14). Ranger 7's disturbed area is about 200 m diameter in Apollo 16 pancam, but (very marginal detection) 1 km across in Clementine IR.

Phil

It would be nice to find the impact location of Luna 2. However, I've been thinking
about the upper stage of the R-7 that sent Luna 2 on its way. Wouldn't it be follwing
essentially the same path as Luna 2? I don't have the numbers handy, but as I recall
that upper stage was much more massive than Luna 2 and, therefore, would have left
a much larger impact crater.
As for the American Ranger and Surveyor probes, does anyone know if the upper
stages of the Atlas boosters impacted the Moon for some of those missions? That would
be Agena upper stages for Ranger and Centaur for Surveyor. In addition, did the upper
stages for other Soviet Luna missions impact the Moon?

Another Phil

The Agena and Centaur stages were deliberately aimed to miss the Moon to eliminate any tiny chance of biocontamination. I believe the Soviets did NOT do this, but am not sure about whether this was true in all cases. (As for identifying their impact craters: there's an awful lot of territory down there, with an awful lot of similar-looking holes in it.)

Reports at the time all agree that the Luna 2 upper stage struck the moon about 30 minutes after the spacecraft itself. If it followed the same trajectory, but half an hour behind it, it would be displaced by the moon's orbital motion in 30 minutes, which by my reckoning suggests an impact near the east limb - north of Mare Crisium. But there was no tracking I'm aware of or any other estimate of location I've ever seen.

Luna 5's upper stage crashed near Pitatus crater - mentoned elsewhere on here - while the spacecraft crashed near Lansberg crater close to the equator. As far as I know all other Soviet upper stages missed the moon.

It would be very difficult to find these craters. Impossible, I would think.

Phil

An eccentric artistic globe-making enterprise which is recreating many very interesting old globes, including Robert Maxwell's Pergamon 1963 lunar globe.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/greavesandthoma...lobe_lunar.html

And have a look at the company van! *Joy!*

Bob Shaw

Surveyor 6 goodies:

The raw panorama, scanned from hardcopy at USGS Flagstaff.

Click to view attachment

The cleaned panorama. The full size is 11000 pixels long.

Click to view attachment

Foreground in vertical projection (approximately). F indicates a footpad imprint from the initial landing (this pan is post-hop). One more is hidden under the spacecraft. C indicates imprints made by the 'crushable block' shock-absorbers. The blast effects of the vernier thrusters, used to make the short hop, are clearly visible in a symmetrical pattern near the C imprints.

Click to view attachment

And more:

polar projection of the cleaned panorama.

Click to view attachment

another polar projection showing the distant areas better.

Click to view attachment

Now I have completed the set of five Surveyor panoramas. I am still planning to get the full res data up on a website eventually.

Phil

Phil:

Superb!

And I'm really looking forward to that revamped website! Ever thought of putting up some QuickTime VR images?

Bob Shaw

Bob asks: "Ever thought of putting up some QuickTime VR images?"

No. But somebody else is welcome to do it!

Phil

>Now I have completed the set of five Surveyor panoramas...

Wonderful pans, Phil. And I do like your treatment of the Lunar sky, very realistic...

--Bill