Mastodawn

Phil Stooke Aug 11

This video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svW5JNPAD6c

shows the Chang'e 6 sampling process. First a drill, which took a c. 100 cm core. It should have gone to 200 cm but hit a rock. Then a scoop which collected 8 scoops of regolith. Three times the scoop contacted the surface before digging (C1, C2, C3), to calibrate the position of the scoop. Later the data from the contacts was used to measure surface strength. The process was fully automated.
#moon #change6

Phil Stooke Aug 11

The 8 scoops make a shape resembling Zhong, the Chinese character which is the first part of the country's name (Zhōngguó). C3 came between scoops 6 and 7 but I only discovered it after the image was prepared, in a paper about determining the surface strength from the imprint depth.
#moon #change6

Phil Stooke Aug 12

Time to put everything together for Chang'e 6. Here is a map of the immediate area of the lander. I need to confirm the location of the drill. The Lunar Mineralogy Spectrometer (LMS) did multispectral mapping of the sampling area to help find a good place to scoop. Some parts were looked at in more bands (hyperspectral), observing traces of water (top right inset). The rover route is mapped but I am still waiting for a formal paper on it for details.
#moon #change6

Phil Stooke Aug 12

The inset at top right of the previous map shows white boxes where hyperspectral observations were taken. Boxes with more than one observation number were repeat observations, and they allowed some study of changes in water concentration (VERY low) over time.
#moon #change6

Phil Stooke Aug 13

I am compiling a history of lunar exploration which organizes missions by launch date. For the first time my scheme ran into difficulty his year when Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 2 were launched on the same Falcon 9. I will look at the Firefly mission first and the ispace mission next as they reached the Moon in that order.

Firefly Aerospace's lander 'Blue Ghost' takes its name from a kind of firefly...
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 13

... The Firefly lander originated as the lander called Beresheet or Genesis, flown by the Israeli company SpaceIL in 2019. It crashed. Firefly modified the design and built it in the US to ensure it was eligible for NASA funding. OK, we have a lander - now, where is it going to land?

This CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) mission grew out of studies for a lunar geophysical network which wanted one node in Mare Crisium.

#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 13

This map starts with 2 sites in Mare Crisium (map A). B and C show the 2 sites. In D several possible locations near the small volcanic hill Mons Latreille are shown, with further details in E, F and G. The site shown in G was chosen for the landing. This site had to be relatively smooth with few rocks, and not in a magnetic anomaly with a stronger magnetic field to suit one of the instruments.

#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 14

What we saw yesterday might be called the official site selection process for Firefly's first lander. But there's more to the story. Often people outside the mission offer suggestions as well, and here we see work by Mélissa Martinot and colleagues looking at alternatives. The work was presented at the European Lunar Symposium in Dumfries, Scotland, in June 2024. The top map here shows the region with 7 suggested sites, with more detail below.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 14

The map of Mare Crisium shows the magnetic anomaly areas which were to be avoided. Also shown is the Luna 23/Luna 24 site and the actual Firefly site.

Next we will start to zoom in on this landing site. Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) was also given its own name, Ghost Riders in the Sky. We can hum along as we descend.

Phil Stooke Aug 15

Here is one of my trademark zoom-in sets of images to help locate the Firefly BGM1 landing site. It's quite close to and northwest of a small breached volcanic cone called Mons Latreille. The cone is visible from the landing site but we didn't get a full panorama from the lander (or haven't seen one yet) so we only have a partial view of it. The lower right image shows the descent track meandering up from the south.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 15

Two more maps take us down to the BGM1 lander. The top image is from LRO, the bottom one is made of spacecraft descent images, using the LRO image as a base to get the geometry right. In the top image the lander and its shadow are visible. In the lower map the lander is drawn in with its LMS (Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder) array around it. Four projectiles were fired by springs out to about 20 m from the lander, trailing wires which form antennae for the experiment.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 16

Firefly landed successfully and operated flawlessly (as far as I can tell), as I am sure you all know. Here is the Firefly web page for the mission:

https://fireflyspace.com/missions/blue-ghost-mission-1/

and here is their image and video site:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/72177720313239766/

It's nice to look back at the landing video and others here. We have had some failed and partially successful landings in recent years - let's hope for more successes in future.

Here is a quick 'storyboard' summary image.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 16

Planetvac ejected a rock - and yes, it was named Dwayne. Not sure why... The SCALPSS image under the lander shows the LISTER drill hole, and beside it a pit with coarser material in the middle... I have labelled it as caused by the Planetvac sampling but it could be from the landing thrusters. Any ideas? I'm waiting for papers on the SCALPSS and Planetvac experiments which I hope will fill in a lot of details.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 17

I really want to have two more maps for Firefly's BGM1 mission: an improved version of what I am showing here and a further enlargement showing the space under the lander, locating the drill, Planetvac and other experiment locations, the surface changes created by the landing etc. They have to wait for future publications or presentations. This is a quick version of a map made from SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies) images as released so far.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 17

SCALPSS is an experiment from NASA Langley. There were 6 cameras on BGM1 (and 4 on IM-1, 4 more on the Blue Moon Mk1 pathfinder lander coming up soon). They look for surface effects of the rocket plume, which will matter when we have successive landings at places where infrastructure is being assembled - such as Artemis Base Camp. Later images show lots of raised dust, but earlier ones should give me what I need for mapping.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 17

Here:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250007176/downloads/SCALPSS_LSIC_DRSI_250722.pdf

is a rather fascinating presentation on SCALPSS with lots of their images. All data will be in PDS (if the government hasn't shut it down) in October.

Phil Stooke Aug 18

I will finish Firefly's mission with some surface views. These images were taken looking west. The top image was taken just after landing at sunrise with the rising sun casting a long shadow to the west. The lower image was taken later with a higher sun. The wide angle lens makes the very flat horizon look curved. Sunlight reflected off the nearby crater wall made the lander hotter than expected so they took a siesta around local noon.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 18

These two views look east, the first just after sunrise, the second near sunset. The volcanic cone Mons Latreille is shown in the lower one and would be visible in the top one except we are looking at its shadowed side and sun glare gets in the way a bit. As far as I know we did not get to see the rest of the hill.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 18

Finally, views looking west very close to sunset. The sun is on the horizon, Earth above it in the top view, with some neighbours peeking into the shot. The light seems to be shining from the wrong direction in the foreground - it is sunlight reflected off Mons Latreille enough to weakly illuminate the surface. An inset (B) shows Earth in eclipse with a nice diamond ring effect. Solar eclipse on the Moon, lunar eclipse on Earth.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1

Phil Stooke Aug 19

We move on to the next lunar mission, launched on the same day (15 January 2025) as Firefly's BGM1... on the same rocket. It followed a slow, low energy, path to the Moon and arrived in orbit on 6 May. The landing attempt was on 5 June and it failed. What was it called? oh boy - hang on.

The private Japanese company involved is called ispace (no CAP). HAKUTO-R is the program, Venture Moon is the mission and Resilience is the spacecraft. Stay with me...
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 19

Finally, insurance for the flight was provided by Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company. Names were not always used consistently, and sometimes they were combined to form ‘ispace's SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon Mission 2’ or other variations. I will call it Resilience.

But first, ispace (through its European offshoot in Luxembourg) spent several years studying a mission near the south pole. The mission was called Polar Ice Explorer. This map shows its study area.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 19

At top left a context map shows the landing area at 82 degrees south. Top right shows the target area south of the crater Svedberg. The southern rim of Svedberg casts a shadow over a hollow which is never fully illuminated by the sun. The middle map shows this target area with 8 landing sites in better-lit areas. At lower right the preferred landing circle has a rover path into an often-shaded area where ices might be found. At bottom left is a closeup of the landing site.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 19

But this polar mission study will have to wait for some future implementation. ispace's second mission (the first crashed in Atlas crater in 2023) went to Mare Frigoris in the northern mid-latitudes. Tomorrow we will look at that site.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 20

Back to Resilience, a private Japanese mission by ispace. The company grew out of one of the Google Lunar X Prize teams, Hakuto, which itself evolved from one of the early GLXP teams, White Label Space. GLXP was complicated and its history might show up here one day.

ispace's early missions were called Hakuto-R (R for Reboot). The first crashed in Atlas crater in April 2023. Resilience was targeted for Mare Frigoris at 60 north. Where were the sites?
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 20

These are the 4 Resilience sites. I expect the site selection process will be published eventually (Mission 1's was). Meanwhile this is what we have. The top map shows all 4 sites, and below each one is enlarged. The prime site was the one used for the mission. If successful this would have been the northernmost landing on the Moon. Alas, it crashed during final approach to the prime site. It would have deployed a rover called Tenacious.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 21

This set of maps zooms in to the Resilience impact site. Map B includes a box showing the area mapped by the LRO imaging team. Map C shows two targets, one from coordinates released in September 2024, the second illustrated in a video just before the landing. The actual impact was only just outside the second target. Map D uses an image from Chandrayaan 2's Orbiter High Resolution Camera, the best camera in lunar orbit today (sorry, LRO).
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 21

That site was found in OHRC images by Shan Subramanian:

https://twitter.com/Ramanean/status/1935917961929252891

My map in the last post shows debris fragments. How do we know that's what they are? Because OHRC imaged the site before and after the landing (shown in one of Shan's tweets). There are more of them - we will see more about this tomorrow. And we will be seeing more from this amazing camera later.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Shan (Shanmuga Subramanian) (@Ramanean) on X

Impact site of Resilience Lander (Hakuto-R Mission 2) found in Chandrayaan2 OHRC images! Co-ordinates: 60.4445,355.4108 Quickmap link: https://t.co/FpWi2DqUAX

X (formerly Twitter)

Phil Stooke Aug 22

This image starts with 3 views of the Resilience impact site. A is OHRC before the impact. B is OHRC after the impact. C is LRO's Narrow Angle Camera after impact. Usually LRO stands out as a marvellous camera but here OHRC takes the prize. LRO doesn't always look this bad - it might have had some temporary issue like overheating. D is a map showing the small bright debris patches first identified by Shan Subramanian.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 22

Bright spots like those are seen around some lunar landers after a liftoff - Apollo 11 and Luna 24 are examples. But these are scattered along a line extending 2000 m northeast, not all close to the lander (and of course, no liftoff...). They might be bits of thermal blanket or wrapping, but why are they spread out like that? I have not seen any explanation yet.
#moon #ispace #hakuto

Phil Stooke Aug 23

The next lander mission and the most recent is Intuitive Machines mission 2, named Athena. I am starting with a look at the landing area considered for several years but changed in the year leading up to launch. This was on a very challenging target, the Shackleton-De Gerlache Ridge (AKA Connecting Ridge) adjacent to Shackleton, the 20 km crater closest to the south pole. The box was the landing area - we'll see it tomorrow.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 23

The approximate impact site of India's Chandrayaan 1 Moon Impact Probe is shown. This was located by extrapolating from the images taken by MIP during descent. See all the crater names - they are unofficial, part of a set suggested by the LRO camera team - and some have changed since the time this was made in 2022. They are names associated with the famous Shackleton Antarctic expedition. We'll zoom into that box tomorrow.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 24

Athena was carrying several NASA payloads as well as one of the company's own devices, a small flying probe called Grace (after Grace Hopper - an important early computer programmer). Grace would hop off the lander on a short test flight, then make several hops, imaging the surface below. It would hop into a permanent shadow area in a crater unofficially named Marston for direct observation, then out again. This map shows its path.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 24

Hopping into a shaded crater floor comes with some risks... but a method of processing LRO 's high resolution (Narrow Angle) camera images developed by Valentin Bickel revealed some details on the crater floor, depressions and rocks. Two safer areas were suggested for Grace to land in. When the landing site was moved a new route had to be planned, but it has not yet been published. We'll look at the new area tomorrow.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 25

This is the target area for IM-2 Athena, a plateau called Mons Mouton, after an Apollo-era NASA mathematician. In older sources it is called Leibnitz Beta, a peak of the Leibnitz Mountains which were mapped by astronomers on the Moon's southern limb. The mountains are now considered peaks of the South Pole-Aitken basin rim. Get used to Mons Mouton - we will be seeing a lot more of it.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 25

The map of Mons Mouton shows the VIPER rover target area, which I think is still the target of Astrobotic's Griffin lander at the end of this year. The PROSPECT area further north is a target for a future CLPS mission. PROSPECT is a European payload moved to CLPS from its original ride on Russia's Luna 27. Also aiming for this area is Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK-1 Pathfinder lander, about the end of this year, and I think a likely choice for Artemis 3 in a few years.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 25

The Mahanti and Atwell sites were shown in 2 LPSC abstracts about IM-2. The Atwell site was the actual mission target. Four craters have letter designations, from maps shown on the company website (https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2) - see the Mission Press Kit.

Tomorrow we will take a closer look at the site.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

IM-2 | Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines

Phil Stooke Aug 26

Here we zoom in on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 Athena landing site. Mons Mouton is a rolling hills kind of topography like Salisbury Plain where I grew up. The second map here shows that the landing site is quite smooth compared to areas around it. Some craters have letter designations as mentioned yesterday. H would be the shadowed crater floor which the hopper would jump into. The last image shows the lander itself in a crater.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 26

That last map shows a bright streak along the lander descent path. The lander seems to have struck the surface with some horizontal velocity and toppled into a crater, landing on its side. A similar fate befell the first Intuitive Machines lander, alas. The site is about 400 m southeast of the target. That shallow crater is visible in descent images as we will see.
#moon #maps #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 26

As an aside, I mentioned that Artemis 3 might land in this area. This is why I think so: First, it is about 85 south, which makes Earth visibility and sunlight more benign than right at the pole. Second, it is large, a broad plateau of about 3000 square km, very different from the small areas of near-polar high topography like the rims of Shackleton or de Gerlache or the Connecting Ridge between them. For a first landing Mons Mouton is a better choice.
#moon #maps #artemis3

Phil Stooke Aug 27

We zoomed in to the landing site with the last set of maps, and Athena zoomed in too, taking images as it approached the landing site:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/intuitivemachines/

I think the image I used here came from a tweet, but I can't find the source now. I have changed the radial scale and cleaned up significant brightness variations. The shallow crater from yesterday is seen here, and the distant K crater. The original had an intuitive logo which is distorted here.
#moon #IM2 #athena

I expect everyone knows what happened to Athena... it landed but fell over, ending on its side in a shaded crater floor, its legs poking up into the sunlight. It couldn't recharge its batteries so it just did what it could (which was quite a lot) before the power ran out in about 12 hours. Views differ but I call a landing a success if any operations are possible on the surface - not the same as mission success. Let's see what it did...
#moon #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 28

This article from NASASpaceFlight.com:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2025/03/blue-ghost-im-2-landings/

gives an account of the IM-2 Athena landing, after looking at Firefly's mission (they landed only 4 days apart). It includes this surface image:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/im-2_moon_orientation-1920x1442.jpg

So we got an image, but several experiments got to run tests including the TRIDENT drill, so there was some data to be had. A rover called MAPP from Lunar Outpost couldn't operate, but a second one took some images...
#moon #IM2 #athena

Blue Ghost successfully starts lunar surface mission while IM-2 lands sideways - NASASpaceFlight.com

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program is now seeing more results from the work…

NASASpaceFlight.com

Phil Stooke Aug 28

The second rover was a tiny vehicle called Yaoki from Japan:

https://dymon.co.jp/en/yaoki/

It couldn't deploy but could take pictures looking 'down' (in this case sideways) and about 25 images were taken:

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/louisburtz/dymon-yaoki-lunar-rover-images-from-im2-mission/

Finally, here is my processed version of it. The odd curved disk at right is a decal which was fixed on the footpad and has broken off and curled up a bit. The very bright streak is part of the crater rim in sunlight.
#moon #IM2 #athena #yaoki

Phil Stooke Aug 28

This is an annotated version of that image.

#moon #IM2 #athena #yaoki

Phil Stooke Aug 29

Another look at the surface view from IM-2 Athena. It's lying on its side with the TRIDENT drill on the top as seen here. It was extended out from the camera to test its motion and other operations but couldn't touch the surface. The view is to the northwest. I brightened the shaded crater floor, showing a rock at lower right in A which is probably the same rock seen in B (see yesterday's post). Below, a view with the horizon straightened (C)...
#moon #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 29

Finally, at the bottom of the image in the last post is a version with vertical exaggeration (my party trick) which makes it easier to see the sliver of landscape outside the crater. Half a crater is visible outside the foreground crater at right. We will see it tomorrow in a very different image.
#moon #IM2 #athena

Phil Stooke Aug 30

LRO imaged the Athena landing site:

https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/1409

but again the most impressive and informative images were taken by India's Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Its Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) took an image and Indian space enthusiast Chandra Tungathurthi found it in the released data:

https://twitter.com/this_is_tckb/status/1953355239546921281

I made this map using the image and that Yaoki image, hinting at what happened during the final approach.
#maps #moon #IM2 #athena #OHRC

Phil Stooke Aug 30

Intuitive Machines have not yet released their analysis of the landing, but this OHRC image has to be a major contribution to that analysis. I have never seen anything like this before but we don't have images like this for most landings. It would be great to have this for Luna 23, for instance, and Surveyors 3 and 5 and many crash sites.

You can look for OHRC images here - you need to register.
#maps #moon #IM2 #athena #OHRC

Phil Stooke Aug 31

I have been extolling the virtues of India's Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) instrument on Chandrayaan 2, so I had the idea of looking to see if any other lander or crash sites might be found. There are surprisingly few images by this camera considering it has been in orbit for 6 years. The map-based image search tool linked to yesterday showed only one I thought might be a candidate, on the far side in the Hertzsprung basin, What is it?
#moon #OHRC

Phil Stooke Aug 31

In 2022 an object was found on course to hit the Moon. LRO imaged the crater it made:

https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/1261

It was almost certainly the upper stage of the rocket used to launch Chang'e 5 T-1. Chang'e 5 was China's first sample return mission, but Chang'e 5 T-1 was a flight to test the return capsule in 2014. LRO images showed a double crater, suggesting it had a mass at both ends (engines and a payload support structure, presumably).
#moon #OHRC

Mystery Rocket Body Found!

A rocket body impacted the Moon on 04 March 2022 near Hertzsprung crater, creating an apparent double crater, roughly 28 meters wide in the longest dimension. LROC NAC M1407760984R enlarged 3x [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Phil Stooke Aug 31

You can see the LRO images (before and after) at the link in the previous post. What did OHRC show us? Here is the image. The impact feature is the double crater exactly in the middle of this tiny detail of a very large image. Comparison shows it is more detailed than the LRO image. I wouldn't say it changes our understanding, but it's nice to see it.

I ran out of landers, but I will look at a few upcoming landings next.
#moon #OHRC

Phil Stooke Sep 1

What will be the next lunar lander to reach the Moon? It's not easy to say because, not being tied to specific launch periods like Mars missions, lunar launches are rarely fixed far in advance. We know two missions have been promoted as launching before the end of this year: Astrobotic's second CLPS mission with its Griffin lander and Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 Pathfinder, a test of a large CLPS cargo lander. Both are aiming for the same area.
#moon #Astrobotic #Blueorigin

Phil Stooke Sep 1

Astrobotic's first CLPS flight had a fuel leak after launch and never made it to the Moon. Its second flight is with a different lander and it was to carry a very precious cargo, the VIPER rover. I'm allergic to putting valuable cargo on a first flight of anything and I was not surprised when VIPER was removed, leaving the flight as a test of the lander. Astrobotic acquired a new commercial rover as a payload:

https://www.astrobotic.com/astrolabs-flip-rover-joins-astrobotics-griffin-1-to-the-moon/

#moon #Astrobotic

Astrolab's FLIP rover joins Astrobotic's Griffin-1 to the Moon | Astrobotic

HAWTHORNE, California and PITTSBURGH – Feb. 5, 2025 – Today, Venturi Astrolab (Astrolab) and Astrobotic announced that Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will

Astrobotic

Phil Stooke Sep 1

VIPER was removed and NASA tried to find a partner to fly it, with unreasonable conditions which were not taken up by anyone (I don't know details of this). VIPER is in limbo. But there is a large literature on site selection and mission planning, so in my next post I will look at the VIPER site which may still be the landing site with the new rover. Software tools developed to support VIPER will be very useful for any activities near the poles.
#moon #Astrobotic

Phil Stooke Sep 2

Papers and presentations on VIPER and its ancestor 'Resource Prospector' have been appearing for over 12 years. Early studies looked at the south polar region with sites in Cabeus and elsewhere. This example is a site on the west rim of Haworth crater, southwest of Malapert Mountain (now officially Mons Malapert). Presentations at LPSC, LEAG and other meetings showed various rover traverses carefully planned to stay in sunlight as shadows moved.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 2

These maps are based on conference presentations by Tony Colaprete and Jen Heldmann in 2013-2016. At this time mission plans assumed that the rover would operate for a lunar day at most, and many sites might only be sunlit for 8 or 10 Earth days as shadows sweep across the site. But if the rover could rest in a 'safe haven' with more than average sunlight and dip back into often-shaded areas when they were available, a 3 or 4 month mission might be possible.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 2

To clarify, no place on the Moon is permanently sunlit but a few high ridges near the poles can be in sunlight with only minor interruptions for a few months at a time. Those are the 'safe havens'. It turns out a bigger issue is Earth visibility - it's below the horizon for almost half a month right at the poles. The rover needs to be in a safe haven during those times - unless we have comsats in orbit, which may be coming soon.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 3

Here is a map of those safe havens from two 2020 studies by the aforementioned Colaprete and Heldmann. They have to be well-illuminated and any searches for such sites will always converge on the same few locations. Add in topography and communication, and only a few are promising, as this map indicates. The VIPER team chose the Nobile site, which is on Mons Mouton, a place we've seen before.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 3

Let's look at the chosen area in more detail. These two maps show examples of rover traverses from Tony Colaprete. In map A VIPER lands near the safe haven, drives south to one PSR (permanent shadow region), then north and east to another, and ends at the safe haven. On the next lunar day it goes west to a PSR and back to the haven. Day 3 takes it north to some PSRs and the end of mission. The second map is similar but goes into day 4.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 4

This map shows the Mons Mouton (previously Leibnitz Beta) plateau with the location of the VIPER area of interest ('primary site') on its southern edge. As the idea of a longer mission grew a larger area was defined to accommodate a multi-month traverse ('extended area'). That extended area could very well be the target for Artemis 3. As far as I can tell now, the primary site is still the target for Astrobotic's Griffin 1 mission.
#moon #VIPER

Phil Stooke Sep 4

There have been lots of studies of VIPER sites, including near the north pole. I will just add one more, again from Tony Colaprete. At left is an overview of the route, not too different from the previous ones, but at right a small area is mapped at two levels of increasing detail, showing the level of planning done for this mission. All that work will be useful when future missions (including crews) get into these places. One last thing...
#moon #VIPER

jjrrffkk2023 Sep 4

@PhilStooke That was a fairly high lateral speed seen in this photo, then!

Phil Stooke Sep 4

@ppesavento Presumably, yes, but it would be useful to have some details from Intuitive Machines.