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

oDoug:

Ages back I posted some Copernicus images on UMSF which related to one of the proposed Apollo landing sites. The 'picture of the century' shot from Lunar Orbiter was taken from such an angle that the landing zone appeared behind the central peaks, and the view of the rim wall of the crater (there! that shows my age!) was comparable to that which a landed observer could have seen (with obvious differences due to height etc). So you can already get a hint of what that site might have been like...

Here they are again - the red dot indicates the landing site.

Bob Shaw

dvandorn asks:

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

A great idea! But I won't be doing any CGI work like that.

What I do on this topic is: (1) describe the convoluted site deliberations, from the minutes of the meetings which are all in Houston. Incidentally, I only summarize them, but they could be reproduced by Apogee Books or some such folk if they had a mind to... (2) use maps galore to illustrate all the hundreds of sitres considered, (3) present detailed maps of the sites which made the final lists, including EVA plans. I have EVAs for Alphonsus, Tycho, Gassendi, Rima Prinz 1, Copernicus, numerous sites at Hadley other than the one they actually used...

But no CGI... but that could be done ... by somebody else.

First you need topography. There are good topo maps for these sites, which could be digitized and turned into DEMs. Alternately, there are stereo images from Lunar Orbiter and Apollo (for instance, Copernicus and Tycho are covered by stereo Lunar Orbiter imaging which is being reprocessed and made available through the USGS Flagstaff website). Somebody with stereo-mapping software today could make DEMs better than anything Apollo planners had at the time. Then the CGI kicks in...

I do think this would be a great thing to do. But I'm not the person to do it.

Phil

oDoug:

Here are the other Copernicus images (the board stopped me in my tracks last time!).

Bob Shaw

And an example... five possible sites at Hadley, and EVA plans for two of them:

Click to view attachment

From an Apollo Site Selection Board meeting in September 1970.

Phil

Phil:

Is C at site 5?

Bob Shaw

Yes.

Phil

Phil,

The more 'snippets' I see from your book, the more I am interested in reading the whole thing, whats the ETA?

It goes to the publisher in about October (impact of SMART-1 is the last item to be added). Publication is targeted for approximately 4 October 2007.

Phil

Don't forget the Marius Hills, which apparently ran a pretty close second to Hadley as the final choice for Apollo 15. (The story I've heard is that they were rejected because the site was bad for quake triangulation from the three ALSEP seismometers, and because David Scott said he was a bit uneasy about the landing approach.)

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

Can you give us all a hint how that story turns out Phil?

IF I remember correctly (and I'm nowhere near sure I do), Don Wilhelms' "To A Rocky Moon" specifies in a bit more detail what made Scott uneasy about the Marius Hills approach. I'll take a look (how TIRED I am of saying that) next time I'm at the local library to check.

I don't have a quote in front of me, but my recollection was that Scott said he could land at either site, but preferred Hadley. And that might have been more to do with it being a more dramatic site. I don't recall him saying anything very negative about Marius. But I may just have overlooked something.

Phil

Phil,

Is site '2' the landing site for the mission where they considered having the crew rendezvous with an Unmanned LRV or is site '3' the landing area for that mission?

Many possible mission scenarios were considered as Apollo developed. The idea of meeting up with a remote-controlled LRV was explored in detail at the Santa Cruz conference in 1967. A rover would collect samples during a traverse hundreds of km long. At Santa Cruz various groups suggested lots of possible routes. But all this had been abandoned before the actual landings were being planned. So by the time the site selection process had reduced the early mission candidates to 5 sites in the "Apollo Zone" near the equator, the idea of meeting a rover was long dead.

All this stuff is illustrated profusely in a certain forthcoming book.

Phil

PS here's the map we have been discussing privately... it was briefly considered for landing 2 or 3 but dropped in favor of Surveyor 3.

Click to view attachment

Thanks Phil, for answering my queries, and I thought I'd do something for anyone who's interested in seeing whats inside that little circle labeled 'New Site'.

Here is the proposed EVA plan.

Click to view attachment

(Finally figured out how to do thumbnails )

There was a long and somewhat acrimonious arguement about the nature and origin of wrinkle ridges that was still going on during at least the early phases of the Apollo program. Some people thought the ridges were the result of lava intrusions, probably along dikes, into older lava flows. In some models, the ridges were eruptive masses on the surfave that spread out a bit form the dike, in others, it intruded under pre-existing lava flows and domed them up, forming the ridge structure.

The other model, now the generally accepted version, is that they are compressive buckling structures on mechanically "stiff", rigid lava flows lying on a "decoupling zone"... in the moon's case, a sub-flow regolith layer. The latter model explained their appearence in compressive environments, where dike intrusions are suppressed, their relative absence in extensional terrains where graben are present, and their total lack of any sign of different lavas erupting onto the surface (spectral, colorimetric, etc) compared with the surrounding mare flows.

A wrinkle-ridge dedicated mission would have been a decided disappointment, unlike a mission to a region of undoubted lava domes, like the Marius hills or the Gruithisen <sp?> dome.

I remember that NASA seriously considered (up to about six months before launch) modifying the Apollo 17 LRV to operate in an unmanned mode after the astronauts left the moon. But it would have had no experiments on board, only the TV camera. Obviously, science return would have been minimal, and Apollo was so hurting for money by then that the idea was abandoned. Still, the idea of poking around Shorty Crater, possibly scuffing up more orange soil, is intriguing. (There may have been some consideration of adding a soil/rock analysis experiment early in the unmanned LRV study.)

I think the original idea was to show that manned lunar missions could do their thing, then the LRV could do the Lunakhod thing, and NASA could claim the best of both worlds.

The ideas being considered in 1967, at least from my reading of the ULRV Hadley-Appennines plan (Download, 14mb) seem to have been much more ambitious than anything the Soviets attempted. Travel distance was 800km (500 miles), it was to lay geophysical sensors (seismographs?) along the route, take soil samples (to be taken back to Earth aboard an Apollo mission) and finally act as a landing beacon for the Apollo sent to pick up the samples.

It seems to have evolved from a plan(1963)(Download, 3mb) to use Saturn 1bs to send site surveying rovers to the locations chosen for the manned landings to check out the situation 'on-the-ground' before committing humans to the actual mission.

For those of you who can't wait for Phil Stooke's book to come out, I suggest trying to find:

David J. Shayler--Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions (2002/reprinted 2006)

This is a wide-ranging book covering everything from the early 1960's Apollo Applications Program planning to the last attempt to add to the manned lunar program, the lunar polar mapping mission, a 28-day Apollo mission proposed for the 1973-1974 time frame. Of interest to readers of this thread, there are maps of proposed EVA routes for an Apollo 17 at the Marius Hills, Apollo 18 at Copernicus, Apollo 19 at Hadley Rille (different from Apollo 15's site), and Apollo 20 at the rim of Tycho (to retrieve Surveyor 7 parts, among other things). But this book just touches on these missions. I'm sure it has nowhere near the depth that Phil Stookes' book will ( I plan to buy both ). There are fascinating things in Shayler's book, though, such as a photo of a lunar motorcycle considered in early mobility studies. Lots of other cool drawings and photos, too.

Despite the 2006 reprint, this is a somewhat difficult book for buyers to find, at least in the U.S. If you have problems, I suggest bookfinder services, such as www.abebooks.com.