Lunar Orbiter Atlas odwrotnej strony Księżyca.pdf

Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the

Near Side of the Moon

Charles J. Byrne

Lunar Orbiter

Photographic Atlas of

the Near Side of the

Moon

With 619 Illustrations and a CD-ROM

Charles J. Byrne

Image Again

Middletown, NJ

USA

: Earth-based photograph of the full Moon from the “Consolidated Lunar Atlas” on

the Website of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Byrne, Charles J., 1935–

Lunar Orbiter photographic atlas of the near side of the Moon

1. Lunar Orbiter (Artiﬁcial satellite) 2. Moon–Maps 3. Moon–Photographs from space

I. Title

523.3 0223

ISBN 1852338865

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Byrne, Charles J., 1935–

Lunar Orbiter photographic atlas of the near side of the Moon : with 619 ﬁgures /

Charles J. Byrne.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-85233-886-5 (acid-free paper)

1. Moon–Maps. 2. Moon–Photographs from space. 3. Moon–Remote-sensing images.

4. Lunar Orbiter (Artiﬁcial satellite) I. Title.

G1000.3.B9 2005

523.3 022 3–dc22

2004045006

Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com.

ISBN 1-85233-886-5 Printed on acid-free paper.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism, or review, as

permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be repro-

duced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licenses issued

by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be

sent to the publishers.

The use of registered names, trademarks, etc, in this publication does not imply, even in the absence

of a speciﬁc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulations and there-

fore free for general use.

Printed in Singapore.

(EXP/EVB)

987654321

SPIN 10978726

Springer Science+Business Media

springeronline.com

Cover illustration

Preface

The Moon is Earth’s nearest neighbor. Since the dawn of intelligence, our eyes

have seen the Moon, puzzling over its shady ﬁgures, its phases, its motions in the

sky, and its relation to tides. Even the smallest telescopes resolve the shadows

into a heavily cratered surface, stimulating the imagination. Each advance of the

astronomer’s art has revealed new insights into the nature of the lunar surface,

until curiosity and competition led the American and Russian space programs to

send orbital cameras, robotic landers and rovers, and the Apollo astronaut explo-

ration teams to the Moon.

The Lunar Orbiter program, a series of ﬁve photographic spacecraft launched

in 1966 and 1967, was motivated by the need to ﬁnd and certify safe and interest-

ing landing sites for the Apollo spacecraft. When the Lunar Orbiter program was

started (1964), no spacecraft had landed on the Moon, but the Apollo program

was committed to safely land the Lunar Module, with two astronauts on board. At

the time, I was working in the lunar environment group of Bellcomm, Inc. AT&T

established Bellcomm at the request of the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA) to support the Apollo project headquarters group. Our

responsibility included the challenging assignment of ﬁnding a safe landing site

for a vehicle about the size of a helicopter, with a half-meter (0.5-m, 20-inch)

ground clearance and limited ability to land on a slope. Of course, we had very

little information about the lunar surface at such scales. There was some informa-

tion from lunar photometry and radar scatter measurements, but there were

strong uncertainties about what aspects of the surface were being measured; in

particular, the soil strength was an unknown. Speculation raised possibilities of

dust ﬂoated by static electricity or fragile glasslike lava.

The requirements for Lunar Orbiter were established to achieve the best possi-

ble resolution within the state of the art and to obtain imagery of that resolution

over a signiﬁcant percentage of the area available for Apollo landings. Targeted

Apollo landing sites had to be as smooth as possible over a large enough area to

accommodate the down-range and cross-range navigation errors, determined by

the tracking, and control uncertainties associated with factors such as the largely

unknown gravity anomalies.

NASA’s Langley Research Center was chosen to manage the Lunar Orbiter

program. I had the pleasure of drafting the speciﬁcations and participating in the

selection of contractors. The resulting spacecraft and camera designs of Boeing

Aircraft and Eastman Kodak (respectively) were capable of enormous data collec-

tion capacity, even in today’s terms. All together, about 1000 pairs of medium-

and high-resolution exposures were made during the ﬁve missions. The negatives

were developed in orbit, scanned, and transmitted to photographic and magnetic

tape recorders in the three stations of the Deep Space Network operated by the Jet

Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, Spain, and Australia. Each exposure

results in one medium-resolution frame and one long high-resolution frame,

usually presented as three subframes.

Although ﬁve missions were planned to compensate for possible failures, either

of spacecraft or rejection of initial target sites, the survey for early Apollo landing

sites was completed in the ﬁrst three missions. As a result, the fourth mission was

used for a comprehensive survey of the near side of the Moon; these are the pho-

tographs that are the primary contents of this book. The ﬁfth mission examined

many scientiﬁc sites at very high resolution, surveyed a few additional landing

sites for later Apollo missions, and improved coverage of the far side of the

Moon. Since the Lunar Orbiter missions returned their extensive photographic

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