DISCLOSURE / FILE
White Flash Below Lunar Horizon, Apollo 16
NASA-UAP-D024 is an Apollo 16 scientific debriefing in which principal investigators reviewed early experiment results for Apollo crews and discussed a white flash seen from lunar orbit.
DISCLOSURE / FILE
NASA-UAP-D024 is an Apollo 16 scientific debriefing in which principal investigators reviewed early experiment results for Apollo crews and discussed a white flash seen from lunar orbit.
NASA-UAP-D024, “Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing”
NASA-UAP-D024 is an Apollo 16 scientific debriefing in which principal investigators reviewed early experiment results for Apollo crews and discussed a white flash seen from lunar orbit.
The debriefing was built to brief the crew on preliminary Apollo 16 science and to surface anomalies before Apollo 17 planning. The strongest technical sections in the supplied text cover lunar magnetometer results, seismic readings from the S-IVB impact, rover-generated seismic signals, and crew observations about surface roughness and regolith depth. The UAP-relevant passage begins in the seismic discussion, where Gary Latham asks about a reported orbital flash and the crew describes a brief white flash, brighter than the brightest star in view, distinctly below the lunar horizon.
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Okay. First of all let me say thank you from SNAD for the scientific help on Apollo 16.
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blocky and a lot of fresh craters there secondary. Well but I but I think that the
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Okay. First of all let me say thank you from SNAD for the scientific help on Apollo 16.
I personally think that you all did a very credible job in helping the science support
room and preflighting to get all the experiments ready to prepare the crew and the flight for
Apollo 16. I think that looking back at it now we can say we had a very successful mission
that we attained a tremendous amount of information from the flight. I know that the rock box
is back there at the curatorial facility or bursting at their seams and the geologists
are going to have a lot to do. I think also that because of the problems that arose and
the necessity to change the flight plan that you responded quite well to get the maximum
science out of the time that we had available. I realize that in all of our flights there
hasn't been one flight yet that ran according to schedule and I am very sure that Apollo
17 will be in the same boat. That we will have to change things real time to get the
maximum scientist or science out of the mission and I think the response on this flight was
superb. Now today the briefing here is in two parts and for two purposes. First of
all I like each principal investigator to briefly describe the results so far obtained
from his work. This is to sort of educate the crew on what we obtain so far from Apollo
16 so that they might have information along that line. Also I like to have him describe
any anomalies that might have occurred that we do not know about now. And second then
we like to have the PI with the crew working with them to answer, have the crew answer
any questions that might still be puzzling him so that he might further his analysis
of the data. We have a lot of people to go through today, a lot of science to cover so
we like to keep each briefing short and we don't want to cover things that are pretty
well that are general knowledge as of today. And we can start right out. The first one
is Palmer dial, lunar service magnetometer. After each experimenter describes this experiment
we'll have questions Palmer so we'll we can ask the crew any questions after your particular
talk. There's a mic right over there. You may set, stand, anything you want to do?
I guess the main functions of both instruments went nominally. I'd like to cover both the
portable and the surface, if that's acceptable. They all set the instrument, the surface magnetometer
that you deployed first looked like it went according to plan. The field that we measured
as soon as it was turned on, I think it was turned on about 15 minutes or so after you
deployed it was 230 gamma and in a downward direction. And at that particular time that
was the highest field that we'd ever measured on the lunar surface. The calibration of the
instrument went straight forward. We did do a gradient determination of the field at the
site. The site survey as we call it functioned nominally. Its thermal control subsystem is
the best that we've put on the moon so far. We have a delta T from lunar day to lunar night
of 51 degrees centigrade, which is a factor of two better than our Apollo 12 thermal subsystem.
The leveling of the device was, I noticed in the photograph yesterday that the bubble
level was right in the center ring, the level sensors that we have are accurate to a quarter
of a degree and they show that the instrument is level to one degree accuracy right now.
The instrument has new sensors in it. These are more stable and it's really the first
chance we have of doing network type measurements of the fields on the moon. We do see whole
moon, we have seen simultaneous data now from 15 and 16. We see the magnetic fields due to
eddy currents that are driven in the entire lunar sphere. And for the first time experimentally,
we have always made that assumption that we've got an instrument that's setting at one point
on the sphere and that we're looking at the properties of a whole sphere. And we had some
experimental evidence of that with the case. Now we have unambiguously shown with this second
instrument that is indeed the case and that the assumption is correct, that we are looking
at a whole spherical response of the moon. You mean you're seeing eddy currents all
the way through the moon? We're seeing eddy currents travel around the whole sphere, but
with these new sensors now and with long-term data, what we're going to try and do is look
as you say right at the center of the moon as they go all the way through. Now that's
what we're waiting for during the lunar night as a nice step function and a long-term both
before and after. So we can see these currents diffuse right through the center of the moon.
The other thing that I think that is unique about this instrument that now we have a chance
to look at the as mutual variations in conductivity. We can not only look at radial dependence
of the electrical conductivity and calculate a temperature but now we can look at the as
mutual or angular variations between Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 site. And that spread is
far enough so that we ought to be able to extrapolate those measurements to a great circle
around the whole moon as opposed to as mutual dependence. The portable magnetometer was really
exciting. First of all, the field that the first field I think you measured was 180 gamut
down and in the cali it looked like that all the fields were in essence pointed in a downward
direction and at the LSEP site it was 230 gamut. Up near Spook it was 180 gamut and then on the
other side of the limb where you parked the rover at the last station it was 120 gamut and at
that station you put a rock on it and it looks like we measured about 4.7 gamut from that rock.
So the rock was large enough and had a large enough moment that it looks like we did see a
difference and these measurements do have an airbar on them that is like plus or minus as much now as 5
to 10 gamma because the solar wind and all the other inductive fields that are around that have
to be subtracted out of the measurements from our magnetic from the tape and data reduction.
The measurements at station 5 were pointed upward and the measurements up near north
rate crater were pointed downward at 318 gamma. I think that there are some things that we could
probably say making a lot of assumptions but it looks like if this highland material is older
than the other it looks like that we have at least a chance of looking at the paleomagnetic
history of the lunar crust from these measurements. The high fields indicate that either the the
perming source the source of this field was if it remained stable over the time period that the
maria was cooling then the highland material would indicate this high field would indicate that it
that it indeed had a time variation in its magnitude or that the maria the the flooding of the maria
basins or whatever caused the maria basins to be as they are today demagnetized the material that
that had been there originally. It's in other words that maria material is less magnetic it seems
than this material. The interesting thing too is that the that the samples as you know are from
the the regolith and they've really physically been modified over the years and I think that the
measurements that we've obtained over over scale size near or 10 kilometers indicate that we're
looking at a depth below well below the regolith and that that this is indicative of of fields that
were at the moon during a at a time period before in the order of three to four billion years ago.
The direction and the the other thing that we can say now from the from measurements of the solar
wind simultaneous measurements of solar wind and magnetic fields at the Apollo 12 and 15 site we
can say that these high fields that you measured at the Apollo 16 site modifies drastically the
the direction and interaction of the solar wind with the moon at these places. It should channel
the charged particles and either at different locations asymmetrically on the lunar surface in
these areas and in some cases that one could now state that the scale size of the field are
large enough so that you could form a shock and actually stand off the solar wind over small
regions. I guess that covers both of them. Do you have any questions you want to ask the crew
concerning anything about the deployment or any of the experiment that you're talking about?
panel let me ask you what is the effect of that rock out there by the big LSM. Did that hurt it
much? No first were you were you parked there over the first time in the TV camera we were
extremely disturbed because the angle was such it looked like that rock was as big as the electronics
box and it looks like that the PRAs were were oriented so it was shining right into them and
all the IR radiation would really heat us up during that a time but then the other view showed
that the rock was relatively small compared to the dimensions of the box and it didn't affect the
thermal subsystem at all and magnetically it didn't they really want to contain that much
oriented field to do anything. I guess one of the things I'd like to say is this what we intended
to do was we intended to drive a hundred yards away from the out in front of the lunar module with
the with a rover and and doing sort of a north-south traverse looking for the best place to deploy
LSAP to get away from all these things that we ran into problems with it with the UV and that it
took longer to do that last measurements and anticipated and we couldn't do that and I'm sure
that somebody looking at the photos can find a better place out in front of the lunar module to
put the total package but I like to say that package is so big and that surface is so blocking
and so full of craters then under a circumstances almost we had to take what we got. I hate to say
that but man I just wouldn't believe that that surface was as rough and it's covered with blocks
as it turned out to be. I think I could have still been walking up there with that package if I'd
been looking for a level spot I got up on top of the ridge and I looked off and said well that's a
good place over there and I ran over there and it didn't look any better than the place I just
been and well that's a good place over there and I ran over there and finally after about the third
time I said well look I'm just gonna put this thing down here at best we got but it's really
blocky and a lot of fresh craters there secondary. Well but I but I think that the
if you look at at least the magnetometers if I looked at each of the photos that I could find
where you'd take in a picture of both the alicep magnetometer and the portable you picked uh you
didn't put the thing next to rocks or craters on the scale size it was big enough to affect the
instrument I think that's the main criteria which was observed during that. John did you know the
rationale for doing that un unplanned portable magnetometer reading? Nobody doesn't make any
difference I mean we did it you can't explain it in real time that's all right one on the hardware
the sun shield on the LSM the latch didn't come loose and I kept pulling the arms up to try to
get that latch loose and I finally had to hold the arm down and and get the latch loose with the
other hand and then as I tried to lock the thing the latch didn't fall off it tangled up into that
little wire that locks in a little ball and that was uh almost left it uh like that without locking
it and in fact Houston said go ahead and leave it but one more little effort that the thing finally
dropped off and I thought I was going to disturb the level but if you seem like you're satisfied
with the level yeah the the only thing I worry about there is that we've got a level sensor in
the thing and if you disturb that you can sort of see that jiggle but the the azimuth you know when
you read that shadow graph off that's the only measurement we get in azimuth ever yeah and so
as long as you could you didn't disturb the twisting of it then it's fine okay thank you Paul
next experimenter will be uh dr. Gary Latham pass the size of the experiment
yes yes go ahead
gradients um which is oh yeah oh we don't have the uh you know because they got the
situations you saw them in from the other is using positive heat but we don't have that
actual photo you took the elus time was taking on after you met the point associate right
after the three footer I think was that's correct yes and we didn't touch it after that right
if there are any questions before any time after the discussion feel free just raise your hand
our our fun began as you know with the s4b impact on this mission
you also know we lost tracking on it prematurely which which meant that we were not able to get the
coordinates and time of the impact independent of our own measurements
nevertheless we could locate it fairly well from the two near stations 12 and 14 which
made it a useful impact at the greater range of the station 15 and uh we're looking at those
signals now it I think we can say that this peculiarly high velocity mantle as we called it that we
had found in the 12 and 14 region can't be a global feature unless it is exceedingly thin a thin slab
of this high velocity stop the signals we got and I must say this that that there is always the
uncertainty that we really didn't see the first arrival up there because it was at 1100 kilometers
and the first signal you see is quite weak there's always the uncertainty as to whether or not it
is the first the fastest traveling wave in the moon and not something else but if it is
then this very high velocity material that we called mantle is not global or exceedingly thin
layer looks as though we get velocities approaching eight kilometers per second
at the depths of the moon of the order of 100 kilometers not nine kilometers per second as we
had in the 12 and 14 region there's also very weak evidence from that signal and I haven't convinced
my colleagues of this yet know myself really but the possibility of a reflection from a very
deep interface perhaps 550 kilometers deep is there and we're looking for ways to see whether or
not that can be verified in other words a primitive core perhaps or some other reflector at very great
depth so this impact will I think provide very very useful data despite the loss of tracking
we would have been of course much better off had we've been able to photograph that impact area
and I understand the curtailed time and orbit precluded that zero group we did not photograph it
and that's for being you know the deployment was good I think the pictures tell the story
as far as I'm concerned the instrument does get hot during a lunar day as the other instruments
had this has been the case in every one I think it's a matter of just it's just not possible to
keep dust off of that shroud I think when you have to work that close to it and at that degree the
thermal control some it does not degrade the seismic data it simply means that the controllers have
more work to do trying to to maintain the thermal stability and it's a problem we faced in every
every one of the mission so it's not in fact I thought the deployment the configuration of the
shroud that I saw and so on look very very good there's one little place where it's raised up is
where the cable comes out underneath it's turned on its age a little bit and that of course is
something of a heat loss but it's not not serious at all yeah we we've had it at rascal down because
of the 15 problems but maybe it's before a guy leaves that alicep site if he's got a problem like
it maybe it's alicep on 17 probably it's not as alicep is on to the seismic good seismic okay well
those rascally things assume some different kind of orientation than they did for before we left
before we left and maybe you ought to go back one more time and make sure those things are
haven't changed don't ask me I think maybe they outgas a little and then take up a different shape
well it's not only it's not only your your near activities I think when we saw that that TV
picture degrade on limb ascent it's obvious that a lot of debris is being thrown around and you just
can't avoid a good dusting down from that source so our our carefully prepared thermal surfaces
act more like black bodies than anybody figured on as a result of all this
and we saw your rover signals which this time provided very very interesting data in that they
showed rather abrupt changes in signal level as you moved around
we're not sure yet what to make of that we're going to work with Bill Moeburger and his crew
carefully on the traverse to see whether or not we can identify specific provinces in which the
signal level is quite a bit higher I guess I would like to ask your impression as you were
rolling along and given along the given EVAs that you you felt at given times that the rover was
bouncing noticeably more than other times that might have generated higher signal levels
sometimes she was off the ground there's no doubt about that to the south EVA 2 that area was a
lot rougher than the traverse route to North Ray Crater my impression of North Ray Crater
traverse once we passed Palmetto was it was really bolder-free area very subdued old craters
then the rover just spent along much like a west Texas type terrain whereas to the south it was
really rough particularly on survey ridge when we were traversing that area with all the
secondaries and blocks we managed to be up in here quite a bit simply because there were so
many secondaries and blocks we had hit some small ones to avoid the big ones
the subjective opinion of mine also is that around at least at stop 13 where we actually got
off the rover the regolith did not seem as loosely compacted as to the south and in fact at North
Ray Crater at station 11 and 12 it was no more than a couple inches deep because we couldn't get
the rake in without bending the times of the rake so the regolith up there was very thin and I don't
know what that means there's a just some very cobbly the densely compacted blocks under there
from that were thrown out or that are now that much covered or whether we just picked some bad
sites but we tried to rake twice and both times the only look we had was kicking stuff into the
rake we couldn't pull a rake through the regolith and you couldn't stick the tongs in either yeah
the tongs wouldn't go in and every other place you could take the tongs and stick into the ground
they'd stand up for you you know in general this area from from the general character of our signals
it gives the appearance of being the thickest pile of of what we can might loosely call regolith
of any of the sites and I guess Bob Kovat will talk on his results on that and of course we await
his his motor firing to give us a little more information on that well we'll be looking at these
rovers signals and see if we can we can somehow pin them down to to roughness of terrain or just
what from the pictures that you took along the way we now have the the quiet nighttime period and
we're waiting for the first moon quake of the session which which ought to be well I was hoping
it would be in the last 24 hours it wasn't but should be before May 12th so in the next few days
and and of course with this last station we now have completed a very nice triangular array
the other three gave us a very narrow base thing now we have a thing with a thousand kilometer
baseline which which if it lasts for as long as they appear to be lasting will give us the tools
to really do the job over the next couple of years and course we'll be using that in the S4B
impact from the next mission I'd like to turn to to one observation reported from orbit that that
has interested us a great deal and that was the flash that was reported I haven't seen I understand
the transcript is now hasn't yet been typed I haven't seen it yet so I that's my only hope for
pinning down the time if you get to about five minutes with everything if you can help us pin
down the time and roughly the location we'll certainly look at our records that would be an
important piece of data if we recorded that would like to ask was this like colored flash or white
flash white what was your how does it differ from the kind of thing you get with a cosmic ray
impact on your brain I didn't see any of those I see well we're very much excited by that as
far as I know it's the first report of a transient event of some nature that's been seen from orbit
I just have to wait for the I should have written it down and it just just didn't occur to me to
write it down do we get a time on it and all that Ken or it's on the DSE it's on the DSE if I ever
get that all then I would correlate any information we get to the side you know how about its persistence
did it no it was just it was just a flash and the way I happen to notice it I was looking at a
horizon that was showing up from solar corona or zodiacalite whatever you want to call it in that
region it was very shortly after we lost the signal from earth and I was watching stars pop up
over the horizon and got this flash which was in size was about I didn't know what to look at
directly at it at the time it happened it happened down in the side of my vision but it was brighter
than the than the brightest star that I had in the field of view at the time and I had the feeling
that it was in physical or angular size it was equivalent to the size of the larger stars and
in my perceived vision but it was just a it was just an instantaneous flash and it took us a couple
of seconds for it to soak into me that it wasn't just a star popping up over the horizon but rather
it had been distinctly below the horizon is there a way for me to get that transcript I don't know
if I would normally get it I'm glad I'm glad you asked oh that's it I forgot to mention this in
the opening remarks but we have about 50 copies of this technical area to ground voice transfer
it's right back there and for the PIs and the cois and there's a copy for you Gary back
that's not what you have no I'll be on the DSE and that hasn't been completed as far as I know
okay now one other thing that I'd like to mention it from orbit it appeared to me that there was
a distinctly different unit up around North Ray in an area that a problem I'd say a third to a half
of the traverse to North Ray went across and that may or may not fit in with your seismic delta
that at some point between North Ray and the Lemley they would cross a contact of some kind yes
well except I had my thanks for a very fine deployment that's all I have thank you any questions on the
floor well I don't know where the s4b hit but this is on the on the back side of the limb so I would
assume that the s4b didn't hit there and it's well after that like a couple of days lunar days
was where did the s4 be in fact? oh I did about 150 kilometers north of the station 12
no the time I was doing this I was looking out the window and I had darkened the cockpit in preparation
for one of the low light level photographic exercises and that's how I happened to be noticing that
there was this distinct horizon which surprised me and I just happened to be kind of puzzling over
that at the time no not when your visor's down I never looked what the visor was supposed to do
that I suspect from what we saw in EVA on the way home that the inner visor alone has sufficient
attenuation to block out stars but you could see them from the through the AOT in the lunar module
and that's of course that has a light shield around it on our last alignment even with the
crescent earth and the AOT we could see arc in our real really so good that we didn't have to roll
up the window shades in the cockpit so with the proper if you look through a tube I'm sure you
could see every star up there the only thing we saw on the lunar surface was the earth and you had
to it was directly over here that was the only thing I saw in the sky you see your helmet reflected
that's what you see you have to raise your visor to get a light so you can get rid of all those
reflections okay next one is active seismic experiment Dr. Kovacs
well we had several objectives on this
experiment I'd like to summarize these basic questions like how thick is the seismic
regolith would be one question what were the in situ physical properties of the lunar near
surface material and thirdly are there any distinct seismic horizons and how do they correlate with
our estimates to geological horizons and finally were there any regional differences in seismic
velocities i.e. something characteristically different between them are in the islands
well the deployment and the execution of the thumper experiment was outstanding I mean the
records are are clearer and the background noise was sufficiently low and we got clean first breaks
completely down the geophone line couldn't have asked for better i'm sorry about that first one
i uh a throw really happy when that rascal worked that i stopped walking i started walking to the next
well the record shows that for some reason you inadvertently didn't hold it in a charged position
sufficiently long enough that's the reason when you did it the second time no i thought i started
walking too soon after the first one went off the one that failed yeah that was my that was a pure
procedure there well if you walk too soon it didn't hurt us any so didn't bother you okay
the data needs yet to be corrected for topographic effects there's some severe undulations in the
topography and uh we can see this in the data but i can give you some first impressions
of uh our results number one there's certainly no variability in the first arrival of velocities
across the geophone array and the uh parent velocity or the velocity is again very close to 100 meters
per second which is uh seems to be the magic number for the regolith at uh many different places
now on the moon i.e. out in the mari and now up here in this finally up in this highland site
uh there are no evidence of flows beneath the uh beneath this geophone line i feel sufficiently
confident we would have recognized that uh now the fact that we didn't recognize any variability
in the uh velocity we're we're able to say one more thing because we recorded the lemascent
when we turned on the geophone line and that was a position some 140 meters away from our first
geophone and we did get a faster apparent velocity and it's very close to the value measured for
our mario for breccias and so with this type of a number now i.e. 200 to 300 meters per second
underlying this this regolith we can put a thickness bound on the uh regolith at this site and it is
indeed very thick at least 40 meters and i'll be able to refine that uh number a little bit when
we get the mortars fired we also did turn on the a.c. geophone array and recorded you know your
rover approaching the limber in the end of eva three and we also got very interesting signals
and we hope to analyze these in an analogous way as gary is suggested and uh that's about all i
can say uh for the quick look of our date at this point we do have the concern of course i do have
the concern about the grenade box deployment i'm sure i've asked you that i haven't seen any of
the pictures yet so maybe but these self-explained maybe you could reassure me that it's level it's
level i guarantee it's negative that was probably the only level place we had around there you know
and i was really pleased to see when we got out the end of the to where we could deploy it that
would be level it's really good and i reported the uh i don't remember what azimuth heading that
we put it on is very close seemed like it was three three zero as opposed to three three three that it
should have been on that's off the top of my head we had to go back look but i reported it
and uh found out later that you could break that pin by pulling on the leg but i certainly didn't
know that uh if it somebody told me that doing the uh training why had gone right over my head
but we do have three good legs in there and i'll bet you that rascal can't get out of the ground
because of the way it went in it's sort of like pushing it into quicksand and uh once it gets in
there i define anybody to get that motor a box back out of there because it uh it really grabbed a
hold of it well again i'd like to offer my thanks for an outstanding execution of the experiment
you didn't ask for anything better thank you it's our pleasure boy it really worked good i was really
pleased any questions before how do you define the site you say
well we define the regular i don't know how the geologist made me not agree with what you defined
that we defined the material which apparently covered much of the lunar surface and has this
characteristic velocity 100 meters per second and what kind of method underneath this would
they or say i am something that has velocities like from our brushes you said something about
you were sure that there was no flow material underneath this i guess i miss and miss the conclusion
well we've done enough experiments on earth and i say that that we've been able to recognize flows
because the velocities are characteristically much higher and uh if you want to argue that there
may be very thin flows i.e. thinner than our our sampling wavelength which is like two to three
meters they could be there but we certainly on the average didn't see any big sequence of high
velocity flows we would recommend that when you say high velocity this two or three hundred that
you're talking about from the asin state that's not high in terms it's every every small crater
that we looked into with exception probably a buster crater we never saw anything that looked
like uh anything but uh i mean it just looked like more of the same looked like uh
regolith i mean you know we never saw anything it looked like outcropper and we were sure looking
for it this too we haven't been here for a long time about no less than that was this
brettia material that you see is underlying the regolith etc that's my first look yeah first look
oh that's another good question what's the latest word on water firing do we have any
idea about what well there's a meeting one o'clock is acting and i'm going to request it to fire it on
may 23rd past deal days and it's armed too
okay our next uh next subject is a solar wind composition uh dr mister
unfortunately there is not much to tell about the solar wind composition experiment
the foil was transferred to switzerland at the end of last weekend we don't have any results yet of
course the foil was deployed during the first dva and retrieved at the end of the third dva
with a total exposure time of 45 hours and five minutes that some three hours longer than the
record of the previous missions which was about 52 hours on Apollo 15
the main difference between the foil of Apollo 16 and the ones of the previous missions
is that some pieces of platinum foil have been attached to the previous design which was
composed of a pure aluminum foil these platinum foil pieces can be cleaned by a floridic acid
which allows to remove all the possible lunar dust contamination
this technique has been tested in the lab on bombarded foils and showed that you can remove
essentially all the lunar dust contamination without losing any measurable amount of trapped
rare gas ions or atoms of of solar wind origin this technique should allow us to determine
the isotopic composition of the rare gas elements of solar wind origin
up to the mass of possibly krypton
a first visual inspection of the foil here at MSC showed that the foil is crimpled
but essentially free of lunar dust that's of course only a visual observation we don't know how the
foil looks like under microscope i would like to thank the crew for the proper deployment and
retrieval of the foil we are very pleased with what the foil looks like thank you very much
can't miss when it's early where the sun is yeah point this at sun
the i would uh the the thing didn't roll up like i thought it was going to and i'm sorry i had
to crinkle it but it was so big and they had to squeeze it down to get it into the bag and it
and it ripped once too i guess you saw that that's that's only a problem of aesthetics it doesn't
hurt it's okay good i didn't think it did
that discrimination between the lighter and heavier elements in in the solar wind we have to check
that maybe that there's a dependence on on on the height over the lunar surface of of the
composition between the heavier and lighter elements but we have to check that first and see
also be deflected much more than the heavier ones
can you see those uh i don't know i'm just probably a stupid question but these cosmic
rate these particles that cause the light flashes i was seeing them on the lunar surface
that uh during the sleep periods yeah those things register on your experiment
you know they have higher energies and and they go through the foil
that's it yeah huh
no uh
no difference there uh looking at it one time out the winter i thought i saw some white streaks
on it but uh that might have been just the way the sun was uh or it might have been those platinum
strips that i'd never noticed when i'd emplaced it i really don't know it just look like i had a
couple of randomly oriented streaks on it to me from the wind limb window but when we roll it back
up again instead of rolling straight up it rolled out in a big long thing and i had to redo it again
and when that happened i i ripped it and then had to crunch it down we we don't see any difference
between the foil we sent up and the foil that came down except of some lunar dust on it nothing
else can i ask the crew a question do you have an idea how that the foil was oriented was it
essentially vertical to the photographs mine mean along the gravitational force lines or
what was it the reclined or inclined it's hard to tell it from from maybe just tell it from
i i think i put it in almost uh a parallel with the gravity vector there it's it's on a slope a
little slope but it if i recall it was it's aligned almost vertically okay thank you very much thank
you the uh next subject will be the cosmic rainy tech era fact about pleasure see here
oh okay he's not here
the pis could be here this morning they're busily at home uh studying the data that they got back
i have a some words from them that i'll pass along as to what they they think they'll be able to see
they're very excited about the possibilities they have uh early in the mission there was a
solar particle event that occurred which uh will enhance their data very significantly they think
they think they'll have the opportunity to see particles from the sun that on an ordinary mission
they would have never had the opportunity to to see uh when they got the experiment back
panel one did have considerable dust on it and uh this from the best we can tell without any analysis
came from the uh landing itself from the blast up from the dps uh panel one was hot in the
taking the panels apart panels two and three were cooler and uh panel four was of the same order
of temperatures as panel two and three the cosmic gray data itself and the plastics appears to be
degraded somewhat because of the temperature but they're very hopeful that a great part of the data
will be uh retrievable at the first look on panel two is dr flasher says that uh the number of
particles they see on the plastics uh indeed are a great deal higher than they would have nominally
anticipated indicating the effects of the solar particle event and uh they really haven't uh in
detail etch the plastics are analyzed and they're just beginning to do that and they think they are
usable yes the plastics are really surprised because uh we had some lengthy discussions about this
preflight and i can never understand how we're going to fly this rascal to the moon and get it
there with us with these long periods of attitude hole that we're going into where it might see plus
250 all the time and uh of course i'm sure those three revs in lunar orbit prior to landing didn't
do any good either because we were oriented many times so that we're facing with uh to maintain
communications we had the sun shining on that rascal all the way around and uh i really think
it those 140 temperatures that we saw in a panels if you go back and look at it thermally you're
going to find out there were there they had to be there long before we ever got the thing on the
ground uh you know and i was really concerned about that as to why we didn't put some kind of
shield in orbit but it was too late i guess to do this well the thermal design was such that it could
sit i believe in direct sunlight almost indefinitely without any degradation it's the hour heating
off the lunar surface that really cooks it from that's what the thermal people say uh i think and
it's hard to say and i we did see the the early picture did show that the temple labels had already
changed early at the beginning of the eva they were black first time when right and uh uh i guess is
the 15 hours the the thermal analysis says if there's like 15 dust on the panel after uh 20
degrees of sun angle or so you'll sort of exceed the 140 degrees on the frame uh it appeared that
there was probably 50 or 60 dust on the lower part of the panel or maybe even higher than that and
it spent about 15 hours on the surface uh so it may have just turned out to be a number of problems
that uh probably uh ones that could not be avoided under the circumstances that caused that lower
panel over heat it was the hottest and the next panel was about 20 degrees cooler the best we can
tell in the panel third panel up was 10 degrees cooler than the second panel so it seemed to be a
dust problem but uh it doesn't seem to to have hurt the data too much panel four was the one uh which
was we were afraid wasn't going to be activated because of the anomaly on the red lanyard but after
they have taken the panel apart apparently every portion of the experiment was activated to some
degree or another the neutron portion uh was partially deployed and they think they will get
some data from it is not not as much data statistically as they wish they had but uh every portion of
panel four does look like it will provide some that some useful data and they have a lot higher
hopes now than they did when they first saw the gear apparently the problem and we haven't again
haven't sent the hardware back to the manufacturer for analysis but apparently was a malfunction in
the assembly that caused that thing to jam well we could have pulled if i'd have known about it at
the time uh we'd have got that pair of pliers out of there and pulled harder the investigators
opinion was it would have done a good witness very severely jammed and he doesn't think any
additional effort would have would have uh would have freed it it was jammed pretty bad
but i think in all they're they're very excited about the data and i think they're very optimistic
now that they'll get uh considerable amount of data from it
Jim is probably worth mentioning on all the plastic panels over here that they had calibration
plastic is in there and they'll be able to put the effect of the over here just to reveal the
fraction we do for our practices but with the calibration they'll be able to take out most
of that effect and experiment the other thing is that on panel four is those experiments which
are activated by pulling the corridor on this small fraction of the total part of the panel
of course there's a lot of panel four that isn't even involved in the game that's truly i've still got a lot of good things and the data since the dam had never occurred
the uh that's for all practical perspective okay i don't think we uh in fact i'm sure we you may find
a fingerprint on there but if there is it we uh thank we really were careful uh to get it out of there
and we didn't uh once we got it loose we gave the usual ten love and care and fold it up so i don't
think there's any crew fingerprints on the panel surfaces uh that's correct we looked at it very
carefully and it was except for the bottom part of panel one that you could see it was a spray pattern
uh it was very clean and the PIs were very pleased about that yes it started on about uh i believe
monday which was the day after launch and went through about wednesday so about a two or three
day type event i think the peak was uh must have been about tuesday there are some satellite data
available i don't have that one hand it was a small event but for this solar cycle it was
very surprising that it happened at all during the mission that to have it during the portion
when the cosmic ray was deployed or available to accept it it was the probability that's very
small so it's a very gratifying thing to occur
guys observe any dust on the thing or any other part of the limb at that level
it's always been our pressure that it does to sit on the pretty thin layer
should you don't get a pillowy on the back of the surface yeah i'm sure it's sent out in a thin
layer but with all those frontal blocks around there it's a possibility some of it could come back
at you that's for sure yeah it's extremely hard to see and when we photographed it the lights are
not similar to the sun probably must much less than intensity but yet the photographic lights did
wash out it's a very pale uh kind of dust but it's very predominant and it came up from the corner
day even in a pattern that you would expect it to be blown and there were some black streaks in there
that appear to be melted something or other and i think they are going to attempt to chemically
analyze the material and try to find out what it is the first panel must be about chest height is
it not yeah any other questions one just one comment that was uh the the frame of that thing was hot
really it was hot it was the only thing i fell through my gloves the whole stay well it was jammed
and john tried to pull it out and i was holding the frame and i started feeling it to my gloves
it's jamming at the base yeah right right at the bottom part
yeah there's something that broke free right at the base and then it just came out like
like it had grease on it maybe spill some orange juice on it
no way
that's the only thing we didn't spill orange juice on
it's not that you didn't try it it's a good cement you guys you ought to start
thinking about that and expose that stuff to vacuum boy
okay our next experiment was the far uv camera doctor page
just here all the complete goals purposes of this experiment which were to obtain photographs
and the far over violet of the geocorona in the upper atmosphere of the earth
i should have said these photographs of course include spectra as well and uh solar wind clouds
possibly inner stellar hydrogen colors of stars and far over violet and possibly intergalactic
hydrogen we had a lot of troubles i guess john well knows um before launch the difficulty was to
keep the camera dry because it's uh optically sensitive surface would immediately uh run away
if it got damp and this was accomplished with a bag that caused uh captain young a little bit of
trouble in practices in advance but apparently worked all right on our surface it's great
the second difficulty was getting through the van allen belts without fogging our film
and i'll show you in a moment that we did that all right with a rather small amount of shielding
around the film cassette um then uh we had some difficulty with the lens being in the way
this came about because of the delay and touchdown high sun angle and the necessity to keep the
camera close to the lens so that it would be in the shadow uh whether it's gold surface
it would have heated up very rapidly but it'd been out in the full sunlight
the accomplishments that uh i will show you in a moment on the screen include uh
92 photographs in alignment alpha imagery and 53 spectra some of them extending from 500
angstroms to 1550 angstroms that's i think the farthest into the ultraviolet anybody's ever
taken astronomical pictures we may get evidence of gases in the lunar atmosphere from several of
our uh pointings which were low across the lunar horizon and uh if anything were
coming out like geysers of water or whatever it is we'll certainly pick it up the data
on these photographs are extremely numerous and it'll take us an estimated six months to a year
to get them all out which we've done with the big computer here at the msc so dr george cruthers
who was the p.i. and designed a camera uh happened to be free the day from work on a arabi flight
and it's here and will undoubtedly make comments whenever he sees something to comment on the
photographs we have the first slide i might say that i got into trouble with the american
photographers union in thinking the prince of these because i'm not a member of that unit
and they tried to throw me out of the dark over here uh this is probably one of the most dramatic
pictures of the years that uh shows uh aurora belt on the dark side you're looking at the years
with the sun off to your right uh the south pole of the earth is down and that uh funny lip-like
things sticking off to the left at the bottom is aurora we think around the south magnetic pole
the most striking thing is the next lip up which uh on the original you can see better than on
this slide goes around the full back side of the earth uh it's called the equatorial aurora belt
and this appears back of the dark side in the upper left corner uh the third lip is another belt
it looks at first as if that was just all one but there are two separate belts there and was quite
unexpected this photo well you know it's 8 000 miles cross it is there's some halation here
and i guess i'm not too sure and perhaps george knows this is a special easement ntb3
emulsion very very thin and of course the exposure was made with electrons not with light it's
an electronographic camera uh but uh the dimension works out right you can't see it too well on this
print the um there's a ring or a limit to the field which on the originals is 30 degrees 30 millimeters
across it's 20 degrees in the sky and the earth is two degrees and it's it checks out and so
the dimension you see there is two degrees across the whole diameter of the earth
when you say this is the equatorial aurora belt i think my turn is one study the third life of the
bottom is that the back side you see no you know you can't see through the earth that's why i ask
you no that uh the geometry is such that that is probably inclined 30 degrees to the magnetic
equator and is an unexpected aurora belt uh it'll take a little more um figuring to figure this out
but um as i just said it my guess looking at the picture hasn't been measured accurately is 30
degrees north you'll notice on these pictures that they're over printed that's because i'm not a
member of the photographers union and uh the originals have a good deal more on them uh this
picture was taken uh excluding hydrogen light limon alpha uh we have two filters on the camera
and uh this one is taken in light between the wavelengths 12 30 and 15 50 angstroms now the next
slide yeah is that old i already were seeing there is that all the earth was that twice when
the earth no it's it's the earth just the earth the earth right uh that twice the image
no no it's it's uh as i said the little halation which makes it a little bigger than it ought to be
yeah you know on this one it's exactly the same view was taken after john so accurately pointed
the camera at the earth uh the earth is in the middle there and if you look real hard you can see
the dark side of it off to your left uh this is the geocorona the streaks are an instrumental
matter uh actually we have a barrier membrane that george put very close in front of the film
to to keep a visible light from getting in there and the barrier membrane wasn't quite uniform
and that's where the streaks come from the circular thing on the right is an overlap another defect
um the little motor that uh advanced the film between exposures didn't pull it quite far enough
for this one and uh those dust specks i guess are uh i piped it back on the uh slides uh
a Thornton that uh that rasply thing was moving uh at first it wasn't moving the wheels weren't
going as far as they did before the end now we have a complete transcript of everything you said
about it and uh in looking at the film which i've done in great detail you can see um the most
serious defect in that film advance was during your short exposures on the earth john everywhere
else it worked fine and uh i have an idea that the pushing the button so frequently um sort of
confused the motor and it didn't turn as far as it should have well in any case you'll notice that
the shape of the geocorona is as predicted by uh dr. Meyer at the needle research lab it's got a dip
and dimple in the back down sun sun is still to the right here and um our other photographs show
that it uh extends at least twice as far as you see here off to the right the print of course can
be printed dark or light and if i printed this one lighter i'd have got the uh the background all
over the whole uh slide and you wouldn't have been able to see that's pretty a picture of this
now the next slide shows uh the one further to the right the sun is still to your right the earth
now is off the edge of the picture to the left uh this was one of the uh sequence taken through
the night between EVAs two and three um you see in star background here and again the geocorona
uh those streaks which are not real extending uh actually right across this frame if you
print the thing lighter um now the next slide shows the two of these combined and that printed a lot
darker and uh i guess it's not as artistic an effort as i had hoped the geocorona produces is
hydrogen uh in 1216 ancient line of alpha and the next slide shows the spectrum actually taken
on that first line the spectrum is dispersion is vertical and that white band across
horizontal roughly horizontally is line of alpha and you see how strong it is the earth is in the
middle of this picture and the spectrum of the upper atmosphere is uh spread out uh along that
vertical line from uh far ultraviolet down at the bottom to nearer ultraviolet up at the top
a bright line just above line of alpha is 1304 which is oxygen line and george do you want to
describe this little more detail please uh so far only made a very crude analysis of the spectrum
by comparison of the laboratory spectrum made in the pre-flight calibrations however we have
tentatively identified uh the 584 line of helium the uh 834 line of atomic of ionized oxygen
the uh 1026 line uh lime and beta of hydrogen these three lines are uh the first uh spectral
measurements in the earth's upper atmosphere uh all previous measurements have been limited to
wavelengths long word of the 1100 angstroms uh which we also cover and which includes the
lime and alpha line in 1216 the 1304 and 1356 lines of atomic oxygen and the lime and
bird's hop field bands of molecular nitrogen between 1200 and 1600 angstroms
uh the lime and alpha line of course is by far the strongest emission that we have seen in any
of our spectra and it's the only one that we have conclusively identified in any of the spectra
that do not include the earth however by comparison of spectra taken with and without our lithium
chloride corrector plate which cuts off at 1050 angstroms we will be able to determine uh whether
we see a general background in the 584 line of helium and the 1026 line of atomic oxygen
and hydrogen as we uh expect though there will be much weaker than the lime and alpha line
forward we've got that other spectrum coming in in other words can you hold on a minute
I think the order he's got him in has the magnetic cloud and we're probably taking too much time
we have the next slide uh well that's it going in so this this is without the corrector plate
you'll notice that the uh the lime and lime and alpha here is broader uh the definition is poorer
but as george was just saying uh we get uh lines further down than the ultraviolet
on spectra taken without the corrector plate with it and you see here too these other lines are not
uniform this is a spectrum that was obtained with the earth off the edge here so it shows that the
geochrona goes right across this slide as i said last time by the way that's 100,000 miles and the
other lines here show that either other materials in the geochrona or beyond the geochron i guess
don't take a little while to figure out which of which go ahead i didn't get our options that
i just said that the next two slides quickly show that well that's right it's one then imagine any
cloud that's the initial what the initials referred to uh the picture on the left is
with hydrogen with lime and alpha and the picture on the right is without um in this far ultraviolet
region all the chus are seeing here are the very hot blue stars and uh over here you see the clouds
of hydrogen gas so the difference between these two photographs is hydrogen and we get the right
group of magic clouds are nearby galaxies so we have a galaxy with all those stars and never
means what not spread out in front of us to study um now carl hannines with great special studies
of these imaginary clouds and it's very much interested in already has copies of this these
photographs but uh you notice that the hydrogen uh it's not just from the imaginary clouds it's
stuff up here is uh out in the open sky and just what caused that background i don't know
is there any other slide that's the last one we had a couple of questions for john one was
that sticking which had us worried you talked about the the instrument may fly on top of 17 rock
boards very interested in it and so what was what was the sticking uh did it continue right through
you didn't mention it in ea3 i got it got worse all along i i just got the feeling there was some
kind of hang up between in uh in uh possibly uh long-term vacuum exposure or something to the
to the operation of the of the way it was working in azimuth and i never was able to
or never able to no it never got better in fact this is the longer it sat there
maybe the cold uh it just seemed to get stickier and stickier toward the end there every time i had
uh every time i got to a new setting in azimuth it completely destroy the level and uh we're
enforcing it and we're on that slope uh right there it's under the foot pad of the limb and uh
so i had to go back and re-level it every time and that was uh
we're really working at the limits of the level level ability of the of the machinery i think there
and uh you see it didn't make much difference is that magic cloud should have been out in the
middle of the middle i know i know i know in the middle you're off by that much because
but uh well that's i if we were if we were on a level slope there would have been no problem in
getting a bubble right in the middle every time and if the azimuth had worked easily it would have
or it would have remained level but i sure don't know what it was
that was impossible no i don't think we had any in fact i'm sure we didn't have any dust
on the legs uh up that far
well if it got if it got dust on it it got it inside the limb there was plenty in there once
we got the zero gravity although i don't know how to crawl through two bags
i that's why i was quite surprised it was not best if i were disappointed because we were going to
collect a little bit of dust on it any any questions before and i'm sure it got some dust on it when i
removed it though i got a little very small amount don't tell anybody the fp i'll be around to see
um so far we have not seen any discontinuity in the other side of the road
it just sort of dribbles off but wait as you go somewhere from the earth and there's no
sharp drop but we're really not as far as the oh sharp curve is uh tenor of the ray action
has been in the middle of that uh i guess it's only it's only ten 12 something i don't know
okay any more questions
okay next uh subject is the lunar geology investigation dr mover
for the benefit of the astrologer in the crowd there's been very little evidence for water
and uh none so far for geysers our experiment may not be as far reaching as there
but on the other hand i think we've made a large step toward understanding the history of the
moon and therefore the earth and therefore the solar system and if you guys can find any more
we're out there would you
so far we've completed the mission itself and all major objectives for the pre-planned traverses
were reached and were sampled and were described and photographed and as far as we can tell with
our quick look at the photographs uh all of these were done well we've produced a so-called green back
at the end of the mission operations itself which was a summary as of our knowledge at that time
it was based on crew observations tv and the pre-missioned data included in that tanger station
sample maps which were derived from the tv uh in real time and that was a very useful tool to us
a sample inventory a film usage inventory any station locations again resected from the tv
pans uh by the end of last week we could receive black and white two-time enlargements of all
film these are the typical drugstore quality prints and sooner or later we'll get uh good
quality so our analysis is very brief we've assembled all the panoramas sample location
studies are nearing completion the film inventory is also nearing completion
the geological analysis is still in its infancy and i suspect should progress rapidly now that
we got all this inventorying over with you guys took so damn many pictures it takes time to get
them organized we've had one session with a crew in the lrl with samples and most of our
questions need samples in hand and those will i'm sure we'll be able to discuss later and so the
questions i've got relate more to surface observations that maybe we can amplify and some of these
are questions that we've asked you before but i have a few polaroid prints of these
photos that maybe can jostle our minds and uh assistant refining some of the answers that we've
gotten on the debriefs after the EVAs or on trans earth our photogenic mapping group
primarily talked about rays by their whiteness there were a few spots where they thought they
were seeing dark rays you recognize both light and dark colored rays and i'm particularly the
south ray picture if i could have a slide one please which is the south ray panorama and the
print i've just given to the crew a single frame from that uh there i think we can see light and
dark and the real question i'm after is of what led you to say that you were on or off a ray
and secondly are that were there any visible differences in the rock types as you drove by or
had a chance of sampling ray material yeah sure looks that way the hills are at the bottom
yeah i think the thumb print goes knee upper right
good the projection is give that a 180 please around a horizontal axis
that one's uh got the same problem there we go now it's a hill instead of a hole
this is your pan from station four yeah you see that you see that black line coming over the
this this photo really doesn't do that no some justice all right prints never do well i mean uh
you really have to see it to believe it that why it is so much wider than than the contrast
that we're able to get out of the photographs then i think uh when i looked at it my assessment of this
which is kind of bad place was that it was a black ray coming out the right right there on the
photograph and it probably went right down that uh as you know that the photograph that showed the
black area coming out of south ray right the and there's a series of black black blocks uh there's a
bunch right there left edge yeah and and there's also and Charlie described this in real time there's
some some more black blocks in there and they seem to come out in ray patterns too don't you think
Charlie that rascally uh that's one spectacular crater that that ray coming down the south south
right edge might have been the ray that made uh or at least part of it that made survey ridge because
it just ran right across uh those rec trap craters and and we could see it going all the way down
is that the bright ray you're talking about in the lower right this right here bill came right
through stubby right up over and right out survey ridge this this way that was the source of your
terrific block field there man and uh just amazing how much rocks of rascal laid down i just couldn't
believe it try to build the end close to that thing it would probably have been very interesting
we should have another EVA to find out it takes a heat flow one
the the reason we call we were on a ray was really a a bonus of secondary craters and an abundance of
blocks and they they thinned and thickened as we i think traverse raised raised but we never did get
completely out of blocks to the south to the traverse to the south there were always
five at least three to five percent of the surface had cobbles and i say cobbles uh 20 centimeter blocks
uh and larger and the blocks were generally asymmetrical in us to the crater or the crater
shape was elongated or the or just a great spattering of craters is why you're calling them
secondaries i think subjectively we felt they were oriented from south ray all the time
there was really just a subjective feel as we're driving by them there were a lot of the blocks
that were not associated with any craters there were there would be a pile of a series of secondaries
but around for a couple hundred meters there'd be more blocks in fact as far as you could see
there'd be blocks just granted over the surface that were not associated with any secondaries
but the true secondaries were uh we did see some that were classic where they were
you could the ejector was downrange from and it pointed right to south ray station four for instance
was one that was uh can i have slide four please i might add that uh that these black rays
and the black blocks that you see here were also evident at uh baby ray can you rotate that one too
and to a more uh or to a lesser degree the sampling at north ray had an appearance of
of being black and white matrix black and white rocks also the north ray rocks yes do these black
streaks uh go all into the crater themselves down very play down into the the size of the crater
it's south ray yeah that one on the left that you saw there was you could track it over the rim and
back right across the rim and can't can you see that from orbit you can see a lot of these fresh
but like black streak craters this one south ray does not have nearly the obvious dark streaks
are run down inside and outside that many of the other craters do there was dark material
dark appearing materials were obvious in the crater interior but i never recognized it as
being a ray that was thrown out with a radial dimension yeah i think uh looking at the photography
the feeling we got from looking at south ray was that that black streak was just an absence
of any rays but i think it's there from the from the blocks it must be black ray material dark
material maybe the dark matrix rocks would produce that darkening it petered out a lot faster than
the uh than the white ray so you know within a quarter of a greater diameter from the bottom of it those
could disappear just because of their general appearance could like the uh local regolith
the white ones being so obviously different you'd be easy to recognize suspect why the mappers did
the same thing here's uh your pan john from or part of it looking up sun and this crater you
suggested was the secondary and therefore the sampling that you were doing primarily over there
to the left corners where the rover is uh would be south ray jektas the principal source is one
reason we wanted to move you on and i think that was a good decision now that we looked at your
photographs and from what you had told us well we we sampled this crater up on this uh close in
rim and down the rim a little bit but i uh man that's not a classic secondary i never saw one
uh that's type locality if you're part of the geological verity and you can see the debris from
there just scattered all out in here to the rovers back over here down slope you can see it right in
the left corner just the edge of it oh yes and i think you're standing there charlie
probably on my face okay
okay the related to this are some of the craters that you called indurated
and had clots around them uh the guy of photo seven please and that'll probably need a 182
no number seven oh yeah that's plumb okay now that plums got a little bench in it
and on the pre-mission work there were quite a lot of them that had benches and suggested that
there was a indurated layer that was shallow compared to what the crater counts said that the
age of that whole surface had to be we just whole turd kovatch tell us is a very thick regolith here
which is what it should have had by the cratering stories and yet there's always this little bench
we're wondering now whether that bench has some relationship to uh the ejector from the south ray
and north ray craters and therefore might be uh might be what you brought up here on the rim of
plumb and some of the pre-ray indurated regolith do you have any uh thoughts that could go into that
that wasn't what i was calling the indurated regolith bill wouldn't it no uh the indurated
uh regolith i was talking about was uh two meter size craters yeah two meter size and there were
little teeny clods uh no bigger than a grapefruit and that that were symmetrically around a uh a
very shallow crater that had a uh hackly black blast right in the center of these little craters
and the biggest one was no more than two meters in you see down any other plums see those that
outline of rocks down in there down no keep going down right right right no over here
see those rocks right in there i think uh near the bottom of the view yeah i think
i wouldn't be surprised but what uh the most likely candidate for a rock that
that that was from down either in the bottom of plumb or or from the lower part of uh
flag was that raw was that rock piece of rock that we chipped off of i
it was located right in the sir yeah just outside the view of this thing
and i uh because that had been uh that was well under the i mean it was a submerged rock and i
got the feeling that it was sort of local to the area i mean i don't see how could have been from
south ray or unless that was extremely soft when it plunked in there i didn't rule out that but i
mean that would be the most likely candidate of the ones we could get to we could no the no way
we could have gotten down in there and got those rocks that's true then gotten back
since they took your tether away from you i don't imagine you want to explore those craters
okay the buster crater of photo eight please
this is your partial pan of buster again not a winner for photographic work
it's at least as good as the astrologer's pictures though
i you described that there was a southwest and northeast uh bolder field in here
we're looking almost down the sun and i'm wondering i can't tell in these photographs
would you tell whether there are blocks over in there and therefore
your impression of this streak
well cross it could not be salted by because you're looking down sun
well i might have been it i didn't really mean to say that southeast northwest this
the the predominance of blocks and buster were oriented in this direction across that
this way which is uh northeast southwest yeah and that's what you said yeah and you're
reconfirming that and reconfirm that in over in this area there you can see some of the blocks
but not nearly as many as here that uh we can barely see the bottom of buster but the bottom of
buster is uh covered with uh blocks that were up to two meters across and showed no orientation
in any direction uh my feeling over in here due to the there were blocks in this area but they're
not there were not as uh numerous as is this pattern in here
so the blocks that you're on the side you were standing would uh have been derived primarily
from that hole and not from the impacting material that it has a appearance of a secondary from
south ray in this kind of a photograph here in the description of you do you not go with that
i interpretation well if it is it's the biggest one that we saw that is a big crater uh from here to
here uh was at least 50 meters at least yeah and uh the size of those blocks and the depth of that
crater uh in south ray is six kilometers away that had to be one big block it pounded in there
and i don't know whether you can even excavate something that large from that doesn't much too
large to be i don't really think it's a secondary person so my feeling that looking at it was a
primary because i couldn't conceive of how you'd get one from of course it could have maybe been a
secondary from one of those big craters way down south i think that's a possible thing so that's uh
either local bedrock or some of the flap or the over thrown out material from spook that we're
seeing there in the floor and the walls great it looked like that at all this was a lot fresher
craters certified this business i mean because it i don't tell them where that rascal came from
okay i'd like to have uh slide nine please
this is north ray crater and there were arguments among you guys and your arguments among ours as to
whether we're seeing layering in there and i think the layering that you were talking about john
is over in the right part where there's a dominance of blocks is that yes a true statement
right there yeah that's certainly one of the best candidates for yeah i just it's just hard to
imagine how the blocks would either all slump down there and end up at that spot or or uh yeah
slump down there and end up there you know in our geology trips we ran across a lot of
contacts it was a great deal more subtle in that one right there and that's why i picked it
there's a better view of that as you get on further to the north uh bill i think it shows
it a little bit deeper down but there's certainly if there is any the right polarometric uh
hand is it i should have had rather than the left okay it was in use when i needed to make the
picture you know up at uh going up stone mountain there was one other crater that we were looking
into as we're driving up stone mountain where we could see uh what looked to be more more like
an outcrop than anything i've seen so far in that it was the same kind of thing only it wasn't
broken up like that it was just one solid piece i don't think there was any way we'd gotten up
the hill to it and we've got some photographs of that and it shows up on a 16 millimeter photography
as we're driving up there and i can point it out to you but it was about that that you know one third
of the way down from the top to the to the floor the same kind of the rover but that's the only
two places where i'd really call out why would hazard a guess that that was outcrop off to the
left there you can see a vertical string of blocks right in the middle far wall yeah
and uh were there any visual observations you made of that that well again i got the impression we had
areas what quiet areas and dark areas now maybe the dark ending was just because of the of the
shadows caused by the rocks and i got to feel those with the dark blocks like house rock and just
like charlie does and i got to feel there were places where there were strings of white blocks
too these rocks right here that are more buried are and the regolith is deeper in this area
is all white matrix rocks around this way uh and and really right out from this little block here
is house rocks it's here and that is predominantly a black matrix rock and and i counted nine
radial block trails out of that crater uh one two three four five six seven and there's a couple
over in here it gave you the impression that you can take a track them from the floor all the way
out over the rim at least as far as we can see distinct zones of blocks good answer rascally
actual craters don't really exhibit the classic overturn flap that we've been looking at they are
more complicated than that when they all get shuffling around on themselves
and here uh as i said we had impression that the regolith was more loosely
consolidated because of a footprint impression i had down at south ray correction down at house rock
we already commented it we couldn't even get the tom to the shovel or the scoop in and around
the rover which we're seeing right back out here we had the same problem and you don't get the
impression from here but the slope going down to that block where we'd have to go down to to get a
picture of the bottom of the crater was not the kind of thing i'd want charlie to be doing without
having that hundred foot line on us so we didn't get any pictures of the bottom of it
we'll wait until we get the pan camera stuff but look into the bottom i guess no i or kin's words
on it as you can see going down there but i like to be able to get him back yeah me too as you can see
as you can see here the the white matrix rocks had more filleted and appeared to be more covered
with regolith than the larger rocks around the over here to the north where the the black matrix
rock the house rock was it had some filleting but it was not nearly so pronounced as this area up to
the uh to the south would the house rock tv pan do you any things you'd want to point out i've got
that up there in the slide if you want to it's lousy but it's i don't think so okay it's a big one
i guess it's a quarter of the way down to the bottom what's really hard to tell you know that
rascal is half a mile across so some of those rocks sitting in there must be almost as big as house rock
you know it's really hard to say uh we didn't ever see the bottom and the it's about a quarter of the
way down from the where we could see yeah i would imagine at the bottom of north ray looks very much
like uh buster the bottom of buster with uh with bigger blocks hopefully the pan camera will show
that but we never pre-missioned photography you didn't had a feeling you didn't want to get close to
that beauty you know that right right in this area there was a bench down in here that you could
probably have walked out on and uh seen a bottom but if you'd have fallen off at us all their whole
day sorry that you get the conflate controllers mad because you didn't get back to the limon time