Hunt for Apollo 10

[Sticks]

As promised elsewhere this is my Apollo related idea. All the AM's were impacted onto the Lunar surface except for Apollo 10 and Apollo 13. Apollo 13 ended up in a deep sea trench.

This leaves the A10 AM which ended up in Solar Orbit, for all intents and purposes lost in space.

My Idea is what if someone wanted to recover the A10 AM and bring it home.

On Bad Astronomy I asked these questions

Sticks said:

1) If we actively wanted to find it, how feesible is that

2) Would there be anything in the old mission logs of A10 to give us a clue as to where to look

3) Would it still be in one piece, (collisions with meteroids? )

4) How could we recover it

I would envisage some robotic craft sent to intercept it and then to grab hold of it. It would then use something like an ion drive to direct it to Earth orbit, and possibly park it in a stationery orbit.

5) Assuming we could locate it, get it back to Earth Orbit, would it fit in the cargo bay of a shuttle, so they could bring it back, like they once did for the Solar Max

6) The biggie - How would this be funded?

Actually to reword question 6, How could we justify this to either private investors or the US tax payer (Assuming it is a NASA mission)

Related to finding it, could it just show up, like the Saturn V booster has done?

One thing that occurs to me, do we have here on Apollo Hoax and on Bad Astronomy the expertise to find and locate A10 and plan and implement the recovery mission.

[LunarOrbit]

All you need to do in order to justify the search is to say it will help refine the same technology used to search for Near Earth Objects (asteroids). If they can find something as small as the ascent module then an asteroid large enough to be dangerous should be easier.

[Sticks]

That would justify the search, possibly, but how could we justify the recovery

Could we effect a recovery with my idea of robot probes to latch on the Ascent Module with ion engines to move it into Earth orbit, to be collected in the cargo bay of the space shuttle.

[Al Johnston]

Depends on what sort of story you want to tell, but perhaps something significant could have been left on board...

[Sticks]

This is not for a novel or story, (at the moment), I was wondering if we could do this for real.

As I mentioned before, as soon as you locate it, you maintain a tracking lock some how and send an unmanned probe that would attach itself to the ascent module and then use say an ion drive to bring it into Earh Orbit.

You then use the shuttle, (if it ever leaves the ground), to collect it and bring it home.

It would look great in the Smithsonian

[Sticks]

Shameless bump

Anyhue as a number here are also on BA

The A10 AM was launched into solar orbit instead of crashing it onto the lunar surface. As a number here are also BA regulars, here is a challenge, see if you can locate the A10 AM.

How would we go about searching for this item. Remember this is for real, not a novel.

[PhantomWolf]

sticks said:

All the AM's were impacted onto the Lunar surface except for Apollo 10 and Apollo 13.

[nitpick] And 9 which was burned up in the atmosphere[/nitpick]

[Sticks]

I stand corrected

I forgot about A13 and A9

But what about my challenge

Can you guys out there locate the A10 Ascent module?

Is there anything in the online NASA sources that would help us track it down. (I suspect NASA gets so much mail they would not respond to individual correspondence)

[bazbear]

sticks said:

This is not for a novel or story, (at the moment), I was wondering if we could do this for real.

As I mentioned before, as soon as you locate it, you maintain a tracking lock some how and send an unmanned probe that would attach itself to the ascent module and then use say an ion drive to bring it into Earh Orbit.

You then use the shuttle, (if it ever leaves the ground), to collect it and bring it home.

It would look great in the Smithsonian

I'm pretty sure it could be done, but I'd think it would be a very expensive undertaking. I can't imagine NASA using it's scarce resources (at least any time in the near future) to bring home what amounts to a 36 year old piece of space junk, even as historical as that junk may be.

[Sticks]

What I was getting at, and probably showing gross ignorance

Would the original NASA records give some indication of what the trajectory to Solar Orbit was

If that was known, would it be possible with a PC to calculate what the orbit should be, so an amateur astronomer could be able to point a telescope in that area.

After all this time is there anything that an ameteur radio astronomer could use to identify it.?

[gwiz]

sticks said:

What I was getting at, and probably showing gross ignorance

Would the original NASA records give some indication of what the trajectory to Solar Orbit was

If that was known, would it be possible with a PC to calculate what the orbit should be, so an amateur astronomer could be able to point a telescope in that area.

After all this time is there anything that an ameteur radio astronomer could use to identify it.?

In principle, its orbit could be calculated, but it's quite possible that it has come close to the Earth again in the last 35 years, like the Apollo 12 S-4B, and the initial orbit could not be calculated accurately enough to say where it would be subsequent to an Earth encounter. If an object of about the right size was detected optically or by radar, and it would have to be close to the Earth for this to happen, it's orbit could likewise not be calculated before its previous Earth encounter. If the AS made only a single Earth encounter between 1969 and the detection of my postulated object, then you could see if the Earth encounter dates matched and also whether the object had the spectrum you'd expect from the AS, so you could make an identification on that basis. However, the probability of this happening strikes me as low.

[gwiz]

I've been looking at various tables of objects in heliocentric orbit, but haven't found one that quotes any orbital data for the Apollo 10 AS. I think the only way an accurate orbit could be derived would be from tracking data during and after its final burn to propellant depletion. I don't know if NASA either gathered this data or still has it. The burn time and velocity change data that would be in the final mission report would not give sufficient accuracy.

I haven't found the mission report, but a further search turned up the following table from "Apollo by the Numbers", a privately compiled compendium of Apollo statistics that was subsequently published by NASA:

history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_10g_Lunar_Orbit_Phase.htm

I presume the negative value for apolune indicates an escape orbit with perilune somewhere close to the position at burn time. If anyone has the necessary orbital mechanics software, this should give a starting point.