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Post by PeterB on Aug 21, 2006 23:57:58 GMT -4
In that pancam image can the 35km of moon rover tracks be seen? Very unlikely - the tracks might be long but they're not wide. How far away can you see a 20 centimetre length of hair?
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Post by echnaton on Aug 22, 2006 9:28:36 GMT -4
This link from Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions discuses tracking with earth radar before powered decent. But I can not find any reference to actually tracking the LM down to the moon with radar. So I may have misunderstood the LM tracking methods.
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Post by gwiz on Aug 22, 2006 10:00:26 GMT -4
I think radar tracking of the LM required the high-gain antenna, but this became unusable during part of the powered descent on Apollo 11 because the limits on its movement hadn't been specified correctly. Presumably this was corrected for later missions.
The radar wasn't accurate enough in direction, requiring the accurate range and range-rate data to be combined with the orbital dynamics equations to get directional data.
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Post by jaydeehess on Oct 3, 2006 18:22:27 GMT -4
What are the distances between Apollo landing sites. All I can seem to find are maps and lat/long positions. The farthest apart seem to be #12 and #17, what would that distance be?
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Post by Tanalia on Oct 3, 2006 21:13:04 GMT -4
The Haversine formula is used to compute distances on spheres give lat/long coordinates. Here and here are a couple web pages that will do this for you on Earth; you can then scale the results down by the ratio of the Moon's to Earth's diameter.
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Post by jaydeehess on Oct 5, 2006 11:39:12 GMT -4
Thanks , just for instance I get that the distance from Ap17 to Ap 12 sites is over 1200 miles.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Oct 8, 2006 17:27:42 GMT -4
One source is the Apollo Landing Sites overview and slides (photos and maps) at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Click on the thumbnails to see low-res maps, higher res links are on the inficidual pages. A nice reference image of the landing sites can be found here. Our home computer is in Moving Van Company Limbo. I can hardly wait to share this with my son.
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