Soil mechanics surface sampler: Lunar surface tests, results, and analyses

Apollo 14 Visibility Tests: Visibility of Lunar Surface Features and Lunar Landing

Lunar Surface Mechanical Properties

The surface material at the Surveyor 5 site is granular and slightly cohesive. Spacecraft footpads plowed trenches in this material as the spacecraft slid during landing. For a compressible soil model, a static bearing capacity of 2.7 newtons/cm •' gave best agreement with the observations. Static firing of the vernier engines against the surface moved surface particles; a crater 20 cm in diame...

Lunar surface magnetic fields and their interaction with the solar wind: results from lunar prospector

The magnetometer and electron reflectometer experiment on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft has obtained maps of lunar crustal magnetic fields and observed the interaction between the solar wind and regions of strong crustal magnetic fields at high selenographic latitude (30 degreesS to 80 degreesS) and low ( approximately 100 kilometers) altitude. Electron reflection maps of the regions antipoda...

Image-Based Lunar Surface Reconstruction

For the creation of a realistic 3 meter-sized relief globe of the Moon, a detailed height map of the entire lunar surface is required. Available height measurements of the Moon’s surface are too coarse by a factor of 15 for this purpose. The only publicly available source of high-resolution information are photographic images from the Lunar Orbiter IV mission in 1967. We present a shape-from-sh...

A Lunar Surface Operations Simulator

The Lunar Surface Operations Simulator (LSOS) is being developed to support planning and design of space missions to return astronauts to the moon. Vehicles, habitats, dynamic and physical processes and related environment systems are modeled and simulated in LSOS to assist in the visualization and design optimization of systems for lunar surface operations. A parametric analysis tool and a dat...