Every good lunar landing mission needs a landing site! And anyone who has seen my posts and comments over the last few years knows that this is a big interest of mine. I would like to use this forum topic to get people talking about their landing sites.
Some teams have announced sites, some have not. But what do we even mean by a landing site? The idea is scale dependent. I might say I want to land in Sinus Medii, for instance - but it's big, so I could narrow it down further: I want to land in the vicinity of Surveyor 6, to claim the Heritage prize. That's a lot more specific, but even there, I can't land on top of it, I must be off to the side by several km, and of course I need a safe place to land.
I can use Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images to locate a relatively smooth site - or even the older Lunar Orbiter images which are available online. Why use old instead of brand new? You may need to if the best LRO images are taken with high sun angles and you can't see topography very well. So it takes getting to know the data sets a bit, where they are, how you can find what you want, in a useful form. You find an image - but how do you get the coordinates of features in it? It takes a bit of expertise quite different from what you need to build a rover, so really each team needs to include a person with some experience in mapping, image interpretation, etc., preferably some lunar science. (no, I'm not offering, I'm suggesting a student in an Earth Sciences or Planetary Sciences program should be part of the team). Once you have good images you can find the safe landing area - relatively smooth, lacking obvious hazards or minimizing them - and then get the coordinates for them.
You land, and you drive... but to take full advantage of your mission you want other things as well... so you image Surveyor 6 - are there other targets nearby? Well yes, Surveyor 4 crashed not far away, you could go searching for it. That would attract a lot of attention. Or maybe you want dramatic scenery - a big fresh rocky-rimmed crater, or a view from a hilltop as the sun sets. Your images and maps let you plan out the rest of your mission too.
I will post more from time to time about the process, including discussions of data sources and procedures. But for teams who are already well into this, how about letting us in to your progress (it's not like your propulsion or navigation technology, so proprietary it can't be discussed... the pictures are all public and anyone can see where clear spots are).
Phil
Exploration Prize Group Presented by 
I definitely like the direction you were heading with Surveyors 4 & 6.
Call it my Sci-Fi indoctrination from childhood, but the idea of the first lunar salvage mission (even if it just includes a stroll past a desolate old probe) just makes me giddy.
I definitely believe that to ensure they get as much out of the race as they can, the teams need to some up with more specifics and hypotheticals!
Hearing about the outreach programs being undertaken is great, but seeing a detailed map of where you want to make your journey along Mare Tranquilitatis would get you a new fan!
Very important questions, Phil! I was involved with the Astrobotic team when the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab as well as Raytheon were on their team, but alas, despite some considerable efforts, we never got the money to go forward, so Raytheon and the UofA parted ways with Astrobotic. It would have been fun if things had gone forward, but much of the LPL team worked on the Phoenix Mars lander and are on the current Osiris-REx team. Our target back then was Tranquility Base with a landing nearby and a trek over to the artifacts left by Neil and Buzz. I was always the guy in the back of the room asking tough questions about dust impingement on the artifacts and so on, so I got put in charge of the "Historical Integrity Plan" that would try and minimize the chances of damaging anything while allowing us to get close enough to see the artifacts. I'd still love to visit an Apollo site (very carefully!), but mostly for scientific and engineering reasons: How has the equipment fared in the 40+ years since it was left there? Does dust accumulate on equipment and at what rate? Where exactly did the crew leave all the bits and pieces? How can we prepare a site for its likely future as a historic landmark? I kept trying to get get them to move the landing site farther away from Tranquility Base (recalling how Apollo 12 sandblasted the Surveyor III during its landing) and also to be sure the ground track was always off to the side of Tranquility Base so the risk of impacting the site if the lander went out of control was as low as possible.
I like your idea about visiting Surveyor 6 and a hunt for the Surveyor 4 impact site. Our secondary site was Surveyor 5 whose location at that time (before LRO) was only roughly known (I think I used your book to get the best estimate of where it is) but likely around 25 km from the Eagle's descent stage. I had also suggested the Ranger 8 impact site about 74 km away and some on the team were suggesting Apollo 16, but I pointed out how rugged the terrain between the two sites would be and how long it would take to get there compared to nearer sites (at the least, the rover would have had to be able to stand multiple lunar nights!). Another target I'd love to visit if I had the chance would be the impact site of Apollo hardware like one of the S-IVB stages or the LM ascent stages. The very low impact angle of the ascent stages ought to have resulted in a huge debris field down track from the impact crater, I would think with lots of recognizable parts of those marvelous spacecraft to be located and surveyed.
Jim.
Time to look into landing sites in a bit more detail.
A very good place to go for information on a specific location is the LROC Quickmap, here:
http://target.lroc.asu.edu/da/qmap.html
You can zoom into a photomosaic map (LRO wide angle images) and when you get far enough in the scattered narrow angle images appear - then you can zoom in until you are looking at individual rocks and tiny craters, detailed enough to certify a landing area as safe. And you get a readout of latitude and longitude from your cursor position, plus a small scale bar to show distances. Using a search button you can find the raw images and link to them - especially useful because the mosaic can only show one image in any one spot, but you can link to all images of that area including those with different lighting.
So what about a specific example. A lot of teams have talked about landing near Apollo 12 at 3.0 degrees south, 23.4 degrees west. When you zoom in far enough you can see the well-known (to Apollo fans) 'Snowman' crater cluster and see the Apollo 12 lunar module descent stage, astronaut footprints and the Surveyor 3 robotic lander nearby.
NASA heritage rules (strictly adhered to by GLXP) say that you must land at least 2000 m from the lunar module. Looking around the landing area it's easy to see that 2000 m east or west of the Apollo site the surface is quite rough (lots of secondary craters), but 3000 m south or 2000 m northeast the surfaces are smoother and would make good landing areas with easy drives up to the Apollo site. Other things show up too - a very fresh crater 3000 m west of the Apollo 12 site, 500 m across, deep and surrounded by many big boulders, would make a dramatic site to explore during the mission. If you landed 3000 m south, drove to Apollo and imaged it, then drove 3000 m west you could end the lunar day and the mission looking at a dramatic landscape, including a giant boulder over 20 m across, the size of a house. That requires over 5000 m driving - there's an extra prize for that - but it also suggests a certain required speed. Can you drive 1000 m in a day? Lunokhod 2 did many years ago so hopefully you can too. Apollo and Lunokhod experience suggested that driving was tricky with extremely low or high sun angles (too much shadow, or not enough to show topography). In a 14 day lunar 'day' there might be 5 or 6 days when driving is tricky, and 8 or 9 when it would be OK, suggesting a speed of about 800 m a day would be a minimum to fit it all in.
This is a very simple example of how images can help you track down a good landing area and do some basic mission planning. Any place you choose can be looked at the same way. Have fun searching for a good site! And let's see some teams getting into this kind of planning - I have a feeling that public interest would be spurred as much (or more) by this as by engineering discussions.
The GRAIL impact location has just been named the Sally K. Ride Impact Site. The Curiosity rover landing site on Mars was named Bradbury Landing, after author Ray Bradbury. What will GLXP sites be named for?
Can any team name anything at a landing site? There's a well-established procedure for official names, which have to go through an international committee. But names at (or of) landing sites are unofficial, and yes, anyone can name them.
So any team can apply names to their site, or to craters and hills at the site. This could become a kind of outreach - get local school kids to suggest names in a competition... or a money-raiser - sell naming rights or charge for people to suggest them. Maybe people pay a small amount to suggest a name and the winners get their names on the lunar map (plus a downloadable exclusive map with their names on it). A nice site map with names and the rover traverse would show up on the website after the mission. The names might not be official, but that doesn't matter - hundreds of unofficial names at the Mars Rover sites will live forever in publications and online material, just as crater names at Apollo sites have done.
Good post, Phil
Thanks!
A few more thoughts about names.
You don't want people suggesting stupid or offensive names - after all the Internet has a reputation to uphold (oh, wait... no, it has a reputation to get over...), but of course names can be restricted to certain categories (astronomers, geologists, engineers, astronauts etc., with the possibility to encourage science outreach by requiring research, like requiring a short biography of the named person) - or minerals or mythological names or star names...
Imagine a school competition set up like this. A team defines a possible landing site (or more than one). Images from Quickmap (see posts above) are posted on the team site. Maybe a wider area and a close-up. Any school class in a country or region associated with the team can down load one of the images, use it to make their own larger map (any medium, not just digital but even crayon drawing or paper collage, based on the image), annotate it with their names and add a report explaining the names (biographies, history, etc., making this into a science outreach activity). The result (hardcopy maps scanned or photographed) is uploaded to the team site by a deadline prior to launch. A team of judges choose the best (or, as long as the submission meets guidelines, they might be chosen at random, cutting down on complexity) and it is used by the team during the flight, displayed on the website, maybe used for sale items like posters, shirts, etc. If each submitting class has to pay just a token amount (say $10) the team might make a bit of money to cover costs plus building a lot of local interest and good will. Non-school versions of this could be run as well, open globally.
I posted a description of a landing near Apollo 12 earlier, assuming a team might want to land near an Apollo lander for the extra prize associated with a 'heritage' site. But there are other Apollo sites. Apollo 11 and 17 come with some added restrictions, but what about Apollo 14? Here is a brief analysis of a landing in that area, in hilly Imbrium ejecta north of the crater Fra Mauro.
The guidelines say to land over 2000 m from the Apollo LM. Looking at the area (3.6 south, 17.4 west) in Quickmap (http://target.lroc.asu.edu/da/qmap.html) you find that 2 km south of the LM is at the edge of a rugged area of old craters, too rough to land in. 2 km north is not too bad, and to the west you can go 2 or 3 km from the LM without any problems. The east is a bit rougher but probably OK. This raises another issue - do you need a very flat area to land on or can you tolerate a slope of, say, 10 degrees? Even if you choose a nominally flat area there will be small craters in it, so the chance of landing with one leg in a small crater, or up on a block, is not zero. Seems to me a lander has to be able to tolerate a slope (Apollo 15 landed with one leg in a crater and quite a noticeable tilt, and they were still OK - Surveyors 3 and 5 had even steeper slopes and survived thanks to a low center of gravity and wide-splayed footpads), so if the GLXP lander is not top-heavy and narrow it should be OK even in the rolling hills east of Apollo 14, but maybe not the old craters to the south.
OK, there are a few good landing opportunities around Apollo 14, but then what? An obvious drive would take the rover (or, hop would take the hopper) to the LM to take a look at it. Obviously a lot of public interest in that. The ALSEP equipment package is to the west of the LM and could be a good target to. But other targets would be available. One very obvious one stems from the fact that the Apollo 14 crew never did get to look across Cone crater, the fresh bright crater on a hill about 1200 m NE of the LM. They got close but missed the rim itself - it doesn't look like it in orbital images but Cone is on the side of a hill, and its north rim is much lower than its south rim. The astronauts didn't see it, but your rover could. That would attract a lot of attention as well.
From a landing site about 2 km west of the ALSEP, past the LM and up to Cone crater would be a drive of about 4 km. That should still leave some time during the lunar day, so what else would make a good target? Quickmap shows a couple of targets. 5 km east of Cone is an un-named crater (un-named until your team gets busy with its naming scheme anyway) much bigger than Cone, about 700 m across and with a prominent central mound. If you can make that distance, images of the crater filling with shadow at the end of the day might make a nice conclusion to a hard day at work on the Moon. If that's too far, the rugged area of old craters 2 km south of the LM might be a place to go - it would be quite dramatic scenery and would look great at sunset.So - a few ideas. I'm trying to show with these posts that Quickmap can be a really useful tool for mission planning.
Yes, the forum is being hijacked by aliens, but sadly, by non-space aliens, the worst kind. All recent posts except mine are bogus. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? But check it out...
Can a GLXP team make a discovery on the Moon? Or is it all going to be just fun and profit (as if that's not enough!) It's not easy to predict how a scientific discovery might be made by a team, but maybe some bits of space history can be 'discovered' where they were not known before.
The most obvious suggestion might be to try to discover a landing site which is not known exactly. For instance, The first ever landing site on the Moon, the location of Luna 9 which landed in 1966, is not known exactly. One thing we can say - the coordinates usually given cannot be correct. Why not? Luna 9 imaged more than half of its horizon including the south and west horizons, and they are flat. But the usual coordinates given put it right next to a range of mountains a few thousand metres high. They are not visible, so Luna 9 is not only not right beside them, it's far enough away that they don't even show over the horizon. The usual coordinates are just the centre of a large circle of uncertainty, and Luna 9 could easily be 50 km away or even more.
But I would not suggest searching for Luna 9 as a goal for a GLXP team. The uncertainty means we would not know where to land, and the area to be searched is too large to be practical.
So what's the alternative? We need a place where the landing site is known very well but something associated with it is not known. I suggest the Surveyor landing sites - if you see it on the surface you win the heritage prize. But every Surveyor dropped a braking engine near the end of its descent. The braking rocket was mounted under the Surveyor and slowed it to near zero velocity a bit above the surface. Then it dropped off and the lander descended the rest of the way on small thrusters. No Surveyor ever imaged its braking rocket, and for the only one visited since, when Apollo 12 landed near Surveyor 3, the astronauts didn't see the braking rocket either. But LRO imaged the Surveyor 3 site at high resolution and sun angles and a small dark spot was seen about 350 m northeast of the LM which was not on Lunar Orbiter images taken before the Surveyor 3 landing.
Several teams have talked about landing near Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3, and that site was a subject of one of my earlier posts in this thread. Sure - go look at Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3, I hope somebody will - but also, drive over and see if you can find that crashed engine. You will be the first to see it since it fell there in the 1960s.
Every other Surveyor also dropped a braking rocket, but none of them have been seen in LRO images (yet). So at those sites a real discovery might be possible. Land nearby, scoop up that big prize and the heritage prize for seeing the Surveyor. But then, how about searching for the crashed rocket? A grid-like driving pattern searching around the lander out to a few hundred meters might reveal it, and in the process add up to the 5 km needed for the distance prize. That's a lot of good stuff for one landing.
Apollo 15 - exciting site with mountains and a winding valley. Apollo 17 - exciting site with mountains all around. Apollo 11 - flat (I hesitate to say boring, I mean, come on, it's the Moon!).
You can't blame them - Apollo 11 had to go to the safest site. Most of the Surveyors went to very safe sites as well because they were scouting for early Apollo sites. But did people lose interest in the Moon because the early sites were kind of bland?
Actually I have argued elsewhere that people didn't lose interest in Apollo. The people who were interested stayed interested. It was the others, who didn't care much, who are mainly interested in whatever is fashionable today - they got caught up in the excitement of Apollo 11 but predictably strayed on to whatever else came next - they are the ones who lost interest. As they left the viewing numbers came down, there was less TV coverage, and it became harder for the really interested to find what they wanted.
Anyway - where was I - oh yes! So there is always tension between safety and interest (either scientific or entertainment value). When picking a landing site, do you go for the middle of a flat plain or head for a place with great scenery? Or can you get both?
Of course, Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 both found safe landing sites in plains near their mountains. So the goals can be combined as long as you can target your lander accurately. Can you land within a predetermined circle 10 km across? Or 20 km across? Or only 2 km across? Maybe with direct visual control during landing - joysticking it down with live video to help - you can get within meters of your target. If you aim and let go and it's all done autonomously you might need a big landing circle unless your system has lots of smarts like matching images to a pre-loaded map.
If you can land very accurately you can go anywhere. So presumably you pick a site within viewing and/or driving distance of something very scenic and interesting. I like the idea of surrounding mountains or crater walls to provide scenery - and actually I really like the idea of landing outside a crater rim so I can drive up to the rim and suddenly reveal the vista across the crater floor to the far side. The build-up to that could get me a good audience (assuming I was in chage of a mission, which I'm not). But even if I can't land very accurately and need a big ellipse I can expect to see mountains in the distance if I pick a good place, probably at the edge of Mare Imbrium or Mare Serenitatis where great scenery would be expected.
Let's say I really had the choice of a site, accurate landing ability and I decided to forgo the heritage prize. Where would I go? I have 2 choices right now. One is the rim of Tycho crater. I would like to land in one of the big impact melt ponds on its southeast or east sides - they can be quite dramatic, check them out in Quickmap, linked above. Then I would drive to the rim for imaging of the crater's floor, far wall and central peaks. Watching the sun set and shadow fill the crater would be a great end to a lunar day. The other kind of site would be one of the bizarre young volcanoes showing up in LRO images. They were known before, Ina (D-caldera) is the best example, found by Ewen Whitaker in 1971. But now 50 are known, some in big clusters, in places as far apart as Mare Tranquillitatis and west of Copernicus. They are low relief but very dramatic and scientifically fascinating. There I might expect to be able to sell science data as well as entertainment content.
To clarify my suggested site at Tycho, Quickmap shows me a superb 'pond' of solifified impact melt at 43.74 degrees south, 9.25 degrees west. It is 2 or 3 km across and its south end is only 3 km from the rim of Tycho, with what looks like a reasonable path up to the rim. The scenery would be stupendous.
Funding exploration to the moon is great... but the mission is only partially defined. What happens to all the equipment once it gets there and eventually dies, breaks, becomes outdated, or simply loses its usefulness or novelty? What about getting those robots back again? Tons of now useless equipment litters the moon, left there by NASA missions, but now we're sending more. Who is going to clean up all the junk when all is said and done?
I'm sure I'm not alone in this opinion, but I wish this project had included the mandatory requirement to bring the equipment back. If all the equipment doesn't come back, no prize and no recognition. Period.
Furthermore, I think this should also be considered: if the mission is successful and the equipment comes back, but also carrying some additional junk others left behind (barring the historic initial landing site, of course), then the prize should be doubled.
Give the teams an extra year or two to work out the details. If they can figure out how to get it there, they can figure out how to bring it back. Don't rationalize why it "can't" be done. Do it.
Space exploration should include the hiking philosophy of "pack it in, pack it out." Otherwise, we'll wind up with junk heaps all over the moon, Mars, et al, and someone will eventually create a site much like this one:
http://www.savingmounteverest.org/en/clean-up.html
Now is the time to consider the ramifications of these missions, while "exploration" of Earth's neighbors is still in its infancy.
I'm willing to wager that not one of the teams has even considered this. In fact, I'll bet the reaction to this suggestion is that of indifference and apathy. Please, prove me wrong.
Rich
Should the artifacts of Jamestown or the Plymouth Colony be returned to England?
The historic artifacts of early lunar exploration are not, as you put it, littering the lunar surface. They proudly record our achievements in space. Litter is only litter if it endangers wildlife, pollutes the biosphere or spoils our enjoyment of a place (like a pop can on a trail in Yellowstone Park - or indeed on Everest). If there's no wildlife and nobody is there to be upset by it, it's not litter, it's a historic artifact!
The first evidence that Tutankhamen was buried in the Valley of the Kings was 'litter' from his funeral thrown in a pit. Priceless historic artifacts! Vikings left their 'litter' at L'anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the best evidence they reached North America. Priceless historic artifacts! The clues as to what happened to John Franklin's expedition in the arctic included metal garbage including cans used to preserve and carry food (a new technology then) - lead in the soldered cans may have poisoned the crew (a conclusion widely reported but now questioned). Garbage = priceless historic artifacts.
You're right about Everest of course, and there people should indeed pack it out. But a Surveyor robot on the Moon, or a fragment of a Ranger impact probe, is not garbage, it's more like an inukshuk in the arctic or the flagpole at Everest Base Camp, a sign we were (or are) there.
We should celebrate what we did in the past and what we can do now, not denigrate it. Your idea is contrary to the spirit of adventure and achievement exemplified by the GLXP. To the Moon!
I have talked about landing sites to win the heritage prize and a bit about dramatic scenery. But what about trying to do some serious science during a GLXP mission?
Some kinds of science can be done anywhere, so they don't affect choice of a landing site - solar wind impingement, dust charging and levitation, thermal or radiation monitoring etc. And many kinds of science might be so complex or demanding that they are unlikely to be incorporated in a GLXP mission. So I want to focus on a restricted range of science tasks, those where only the most basic observations are required to make a new and significant scientific advance. For instance, are there places where we can land and just take pictures, and those images would contain useful new information?
It seems clear to me that landing in a random location anywhere on the Moon, while great for winning the GLXP, is not going to teach us very much by itself about the Moon. Images of a typical mare surface would look the same as the images from Apollo 11 or 12, or most of the Surveyors. So it's got to be a really interesting or different kind of place, something we've never seen before close up. What kind of places could we choose that would be completely unlike anything seen by Apollo? I have two initial suggestions, and we'll see where we go from there. (PS feel free to contribute other ideas - otherwise the forum is completely over-run by scammers and spammers trying to redirect your eyeballs to their targets)
First, go to the LROC Quickmap:
http://target.lroc.asu.edu/da/qmap.html
Then you can zoom in to the sites I suggest - the cursor position gives a readout of latitude and longitude and you can move around and zoom in until you get where you want to go.
First type of site: one of the young volcanic centres If that's what they are) like Ina (D-Caldera) at 18.65 N, 5.31 E. There are many other examples discovered recently, including the Cauchy dome at 7.13 N, 37.60 E and the Tobias Mayer cluster at 14.60 N, 33.98 W. These weird pits with very sharp edges were discovered first from Apollo images but were never visited. Even a few close-up images, especially in stereo, would tell us a lot about the nature of the pit floors and their boundaries, crucial to understanding their evolution. Are the floors lava flows or 'lag deposits' of coarse fragments formed when gas venting blew away the finer parts of the regolith? Land 1 km away and drive to the edge, or even into the pit if you can, taking pictures all the way, and lots of new science will be possible. It would be good to have analytical equipment on board, but even images will help us here.
Second type of site: a fresh impact melt pond. The most dramatic are found in or close to very fresh large craters. TYcho is a fantastic example of this. Look here: 44.33 S, 8.98 W (there are many more nearby). It's a flat 'pond' made of rock melted by the asteroid impact which drained down into this hollow. It should be easy to land on or near the pond and drive around - Surveyor 7 landed at a spot like this (in fact a melt pond was its target, but it missed by a small amount... its landing site was easily traversible in a rover). There should be fascinating views of melt flows and fractures, all remarkably fresh by lunar standards. If this is too far south for you, there are lots of fresh craters around, and many images to help you find one at the LROC website:
http://www.lroc.asu.edu/
- go to the images tab and check out the featured images.
There would be other types of target too - skylights and similar pits, crater central peaks etc. Do you have a favourite?
GLXP teams have great engineers. And maybe marketing/communication specialists. But I have always been concerned that there may not be enough planetary scientists among the teams. OK, I know there are a few! Apart from science there's also the question of how a team might make a map of its landing site for public use, including promotion. Nothing says 'I'm going to land on the Moon' like a good map of the landing site. Well, I may be biased, I'm a cartographer among other things!
Still, if you want to make a map, how do you go about it? (I am assuming no access to fancy GIS mapping facilities.) I'm busy right now making maps to suggest where a non-GLXP entity might land in a few years, so how do I go about it? First I want to say you can't do it with just one map. Imagine you were responsible for a group visit to some famous site... let's say Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. A map of the world, or even Canada, showing where Lake Louise is might be a start. But obviously you would also want a map of the area showing highway access from major places including the local cities and airports. That's how you get there. Then you need a close-up map of the site to show the actual place - the lake, the big hotel, public parking, other facilities and attractions. A lunar landing site would be the same. Start with a map of the Moon to locate it, but then zoom in at least a couple of steps to really get in close with lots of detail.
A good place to start would be the Lunar and Planetary Institute's page of lunar maps:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/
There are lots of maps linked from there - each link goes to an index page with anything from a few to hundreds of maps. You can easily find a global map and a regional map, maybe even in several scales, to start zooming in. But for really detailed maps and the most up-to-date images, Quickmap is a good place to start:
http://target.lroc.asu.edu/q3/
- that's an updated version of the page. It takes just a few minutes of playing to figure it out. But sometimes an intermediate step is a good idea as well. Try this site:
http://www.mapaplanet.org/
Map-a-planet is a USGS site. Choose your world - the Moon in this case. Choose a dataset - I suggest the lunar orbiter base to begin with, as Clementine is too high-sun near the equator to show topography. If you're landing at 45 degrees north or south, or polewards of that, Clementine will work fine, probably better. That takes you to a page with a little map, almost illegible, and a menu. Go to the bottom of the menu and select 'advanced options'. Now you can do two essential things. One - choose resolution in pixels per degree - start small and increase the number until you get it looking right. Two - put latitude and longitude limits on the map.
I would use a map from LPI to decide on those limits. Let's say I want to land at 0 lat, 0 long in Sinus Medii. My map might go from 5 degrees west to 5 degrees east, and 5 degrees north to 5 south (10 degrees across, or 300 km). Click the button at bottom to show the map. If it comes in too small increase the resolution. You can change the map projection if you like, and also add a grid to the map - I would add a 5 degree grid, or even a 1 degree grid, to it. The finished map can be right-clicked and saved (on a Windows machine, or equivalent on any other system).
Then I might zoom in on Quickmap until I get the maximum size before the NAC images appear, do a screen grab and paste it over the map-a-planet map, and adjust iteratively until it fits perfectly (using Adobe Photoshop or any comparable software). Now you have the Quickmap LROC-WAC detail in map geometry and you can draw the grid over it if you like.
For more detail still, take a bit from that map - say one of the 1 degree grid cells - and blow it up to 10 times the size. Now the NAC frames linked from Quickmap can be pasted over it to provide much higher levels of detail.
Have fun making maps, and post a few so we can see what you're planning.
Yes, however we also want to see the image intended landing
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There's a special prize for visiting 'heritage' hardware, some artifact of a previous mission. It's easy to think this only applies to Apollo sites but of course that's not true. Anything landed or crashed in the earlier decades of exploration would do. But what exactly could be included? Actually we can't say because those kinds of definitions have not been made yet. But here are some thoughts.
Landed or crashed? It doesn't seem to matter, it's all 'heritage', or perhaps 'history' would be a better word. The scattered remains of a deliberately crashed Ranger spacecraft or a failed lander like Luna 8 or Surveyor 4 are as legitimate a target as a successful lander (I'm assuming). Maybe a big intact lander is easier to find than scattered fragments, but on the other hand fragments might be spread over a larger area and easier to run into, especially if we don't know exactly where the lander is. In other words the fragments of Luna 8 might be easier to find than the successful Luna 9.
American or Soviet? (or 'other'?). This is interesting and unpredictable. NASA has come up with guidelines for treating its hardware on the lunar surface properly. Note that by law all artifacts on the Moon still belong to the entity which sent it, they are not 'abandoned'. So NASA says you have to keep a certain distance away from their landers, varying with individual missions (details can be found elsewhere, I won't go into them now), and for a crash site you can go right up to a crater rim but not inside it without consultation. The conditions are much more stringent for Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 than for the other Apollos.
OK, but what about Soviet spacecraft? Russia takes over authority for those sites, but they have not said anything about restrictions on visiting them. Does that mean you could drive a rover up to Luna 16, the first successful robotic sample return mission, and start poking around? Not necessarily, but we don't know how to handle it right now - better to keep a respectful distance, probably, rather than cause an international incident. And let's not forget that Lunokhod 2 was auctioned off and is now privately owned, so nobody should assume they have any right to go look at that old rover.
And then there are the 'others'. Europe (ESA), Japan, China and India have all had spacecraft crash on the surface, and none of them have said anything about what visitors might be permitted to do. On the other hand, they are all fairly recent, so do they even count as 'heritage'? Does the prize only apply to the first wave of exploration ending in the 1970s with Soviet rovers and sample return missions? Or can we apply it to - for example - ESA's SMART-1 probe or Japan's Kaguya orbiter, now both crashed? And as a real puzzle, could we apply the heritage designation to the upper stage or braking stage of a team's own vehicle, crashed only minutes before or even slightly after the landing? Those questions still have to be ironed out. It seems to me that driving over to see your own crashed upper stage would be dramatic enough to attract lots of public attention even if it didn't win an extra prize, but with a million dollars hanging in the balance people would want to know in advance what the story is.
So - have fun pondering what you might do to try to win that special prize.
Good images will definitely help finding safe landing area. The most difficult part of lunar expedition is finding the landing area, this Article well explained the possible options available in exploring the landing areas. Thanks for the Article.
Lucky One Chinese
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