NASA-UAP-D024, “Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing”
▮ AI SYNOPSIS · Sonnet 4.6
NASA-UAP-D024 is an audio recording of a post-mission scientific debriefing conducted following the Apollo 16 mission, held in Houston, Texas. The session involved NASA principal investigators and Apollo 16 crew members reviewing preliminary experiment results and anomalies in preparation for Apollo 17. Beginning around the 25-minute mark, seismologist Gary Latham raises an unreported visual anomaly: an astronaut (identified in context as Ken Mattingly) described observing a brief, bright flash from orbit — brighter than any star in his field of view, appearing below the lunar horizon, instantaneous in duration, and noticed peripherally while the cockpit was darkened for low-light photography. Latham characterizes it as possibly the first reported transient luminous event observed from lunar orbit.
The flash report is notable because it had not been formally documented prior to this debriefing, and Latham explicitly states no transcript had yet been produced. The crew member could not give a precise time or location, though the data was noted as potentially recoverable from the DSE recorder. The exchange is significant for UAP-adjacent records because it represents a credible, contemporaneous firsthand account of an unexplained optical phenomenon in a controlled observational environment. No redactions are apparent in the available transcript, but the full DSE audio correlation is not included in this release.
▮ TOP WORDS IN THIS DOCUMENT
This debriefing includes presentations from principal investigators of various Apollo experiments. The principal investigators describe preliminary results of their work to educate the Apollo crews about what they’ve obtained from Apollo 16 to help prepare for Apollo 17. They also describe anomalies, such as a “flash” that was observed that had not yet been reported. The flash is mentioned beginning at 25:15.
⌥ TRANSCRIPT
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 pre-flighting to get all the experiments ready to prepare the crew and the flight for
Apollo 16. I think that looking back on 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 scientists 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 obtained 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. First one is Palmer Dial
lunar service magnetometer. After each experimenter describes his 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 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 that the site survey as we call it functioned normally. The it's
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 that the instrument is level to a one degree accuracy right
now. The 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 on a 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 that go travel around the whole sphere but with these new sensors now and with long-term
data what we 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 is a
nice step function and a long-term both before and after so we can see this these currents diffuse
right through the center of the moon. The 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 connectivity we
can not only look at radial the dependence of the electrical connectivity and calculate a
temperature but now we can look at the as mutual or angular variations between Apollo 15 and Apollo
16 side and those 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 of course 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 Cayley it looked like that all the fields were in essence pointed
in a downward direction and at the Alsep side it was 230 gamma up near spook it was 180 gamma
and then on the other side of the limb where you parked the rover at the last station it was 120
gamma 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 that was
and the measurements up near north ray 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 were cooling then the
highland material would indicate this high field would indicate that it 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 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 scale size and the order of 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 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 charge particles and either
at different locations asymmetrically on the lunar surface in these areas and in some cases
that one can 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 of the moon
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 experiments we've talked about?
Parma let me ask you what is the effect of that rock out there by the big LSM did that hurt it much?
No first where 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 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 don't 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
our set 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 was so blocky and so full of craters then under a certain 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 have 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 I think that if you look at at least the magnetometers I looked at
each of the photos that I could find where you'd taken a picture of both the Alcept magnetometer
and the portable you picked you didn't put the thing next to rocks or craters on the scale size
that 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 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 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 into the little
ball and that was a almost left it like that without locking it and in fact Houston said go
ahead and leave it but one more to leopard 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 of course.
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 Paulen.
Next experimenter will be Dr. Gary Latham. Pass the size of the experiment.
Can you ask the question from Paulen? Yes yes go ahead.
You asked the question from Paulen, how do you wish on a few radians in there did you get out there?
Radians from which it's called that. Oh we don't have the you know because they got the
fluctuations from solar wind from the other end. It's usually positive heat but we don't
have that. You don't have that to take time.
Actual photo you took of the azimuth you know after you've had the point associated with it.
The three footer I think was that's correct yes and we didn't touch it after that.
If there are any questions before any time after the discussion feel free to raise your hand.
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 we are looking at those
signals now I think we can say that this peculiarly high velocity mantle as we call 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 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 as 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 occluded that et cetera we did not photograph it
and that is 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 the lunar day as the other instruments
have 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 that that
degrades 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've faced in every every one of the mission so it's not in fact I thought the deployment to
the configuration of the shroud that I saw and so on look 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 serious at all you know we
we've padded that rascal down because of the 15 problems but maybe it's before a guy leaves
that Alsep site if he's got a problem like it maybe is Alsep on 17 probably it's not
Alsep is on to the seismic good seismic good 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 out gas 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 that 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 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
I'm pressing a North Ray Crater traverse once we passed Palmetto 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 to the right so the regolith up there was very thin
and I don't know where that means there's a
just some very cobbly the distally 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 luck we had was kicking stuff into the rake we couldn't pull the rake
through the regolith and you couldn't stick the tongs in either and the tongs wouldn't go in
and in 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 what we can quite 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 clake 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 based 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 of 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 and 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 you didn't see 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 size of the faces
you know how about its persistence did it just no it was just it was just a flash
the way I happen to notice it I was looking at a at a horizon that was showing up from solar
corona or zodiac or light 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 I didn't know what I'm looking directly at it at the time
happening 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
but it was just a it was just an instantaneous flash and that 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 rate back there and for the PIs and the collies and there's a copy
for you Gary back yeah that's not what you have to know be on now
that take on yeah on the DSC yeah and that hasn't been completed as far as I know okay
but one 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 traversed to north ray one across and that may or may not fit in with your seismic delta
that at some point between north ray and the lambda they would cross a contact of some kind yes
well it's up to add my thanks for a very fine deployment that's all I have thank you any questions
on the fork well I don't know where the s4b hit but this is on the on the backside of the limb so
I would assume that the s4b didn't hit there and as well after that like a couple of days lunar days
150
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 with your visors down I never looked what the visor was
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 a crescent earth in the AOT we could see Arknar really 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
get a light so you can get rid of all those reflections
okay next one is active seismic experiment Dr. Kovach
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 characterically different between them are in the islands
well the deployment and the execution of the thumper experiment was outstanding I mean the records
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 was so 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 and the charged
positions 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 the one that failed
yeah that was my that was pure procedure there well if you walk too soon it didn't hurt us any
so didn't bother you okay the the data needs yet to be corrected for topographic effects
there's some severe undulations in the topography and we can see this in the data but I can give you
some first impressions of our results number one there's certainly no variability in the first
arrival velocities across the geophone array and the parent velocity or the velocity is again very
close to a hundred meters per second which is seems to be the magic number for the regolith at
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 there are no evidence of flows beneath the beneath this geophone line
I feel sufficiently confident we would have recognized that
now the fact that we didn't recognize any variability in the velocity we're able to say one more thing
because we recorded the limb ascent when we turned on the geophone line and that was a position some
hundred and forty meters away from our first geophone and we did get a faster apparent velocity
and it's very close to the value measure for Frau Marl for brettius and so with this type of
a number now i.e. two to three hundred meters per second underlying this this regolith we can put a
thickness bound on the regolith at this site and it is indeed very thick at least 40 meters
and i'll be able to refine that number a little bit when we get the mortars fired
we also did turn on the ASE geophone array and recorded you know your rover approaching the
limb during the end of EVA3 and we also got very interesting signals and we hope to analyze these
analogous way as Gary has suggested and that's about all i can say 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
self-explained maybe you could reassure me that it's level it's level now guarantee is
that was probably the only level place we had around there 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 i don't remember what azimuth heading that we put it on it's 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 found out later that
you could break that pin by pulling on the leg but i certainly didn't know that if it somebody
told me that doing the training while going 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 once it gets in there i define anybody to get that
mortar box back out of there because it really grabbed a hold of it
well again i 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 question before how do you define the assignment you said
well we defined the regular i don't know how the geologists may not agree with what you defined
but we defined the material which apparently covers much of the lunar surface and has this
characteristic velocity 100 meters per second and what kind of method underneath is what they
were saying i'm something that has velocities like fral moral friction you said something about
you were sure that there was no flow material underneath this i guess i'm missing miss
well we've done enough experiments on earth and i say that that we've been able to recognize flows
because of velocities are characteristically much higher and 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 when you say high velocity this two or three hundred that you're talking
about from the ancient state that's not high in terms of it's every every small crater that
we looked into with exception probably a buster crater we never saw anything that looked like
anything but i mean it just looked like more of the same looked like
regolith i mean you know we never saw anything it looked like outcropper and we were sure looking
for it this too is we haven't been here for a long time about maleficent that was this
breccia material that you say is underlined the regolith is that right that's my first look yeah first
look what oh that's another good question what's the latest word on water firing do we have any
idea about when well it's meeting one o'clock is acting and i'm going to request it on page 23rd
past deal days and it's armed too
okay our next next subject is a solar wind composition 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 and mse 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
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 that i had to squeeze it down to get it into the bag and it
it ripped once too i guess you saw that that's that's only a problem of aesthetics it doesn't
hurt it okay good i didn't think it did
between the the lighter and heavier elements 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
it was that on the lighter part of it also be deflected much more than the heavier ones
can you see those uh i don't know i 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 no they have higher energies and they go through
the foil
no uh no difference there uh looking at it one time after one i thought i saw some white streaks
on it but 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 looked like i had
a couple of randomly oriented streaks on it to me from the wind limb window but when we rolled 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 ripped it and then had to crunch it down we don't see any difference
between the foil we sent up and the foil that came down except 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 mind mean along the gravitational force lines or
was it the reclined or inclined it's hard to tell it from even just tell it from the picture
i i think i put it in almost 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 thank you very much thank you
thank you
the uh next subject will be the cosmic radio detector uh 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 uh they are 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'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 this from the best we can tell
without any analysis came from the landing itself from the blast up from the dps
uh panel one was hot in the uh 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 uh cosmic ray date itself in the plastics appears to be degraded somewhat because of the
temperature but uh they're very hopeful that uh a great part of the data will be uh
retrievable at the first look on panel two Dr. Fleischer says that 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 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 pre-flight 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 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 the
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 on a panel 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 oh 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 eye or 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
right and uh i guess is the 15 hours the the thermal analysis says if there's like 15
percent dust on the panel after 20 degrees of sun angle or so you'll sort of exceed the 140 degrees
on the frame it appeared that there was probably 50 or 60 percent dust on the lower part of the panel
or maybe even higher than that and it spent about 15 hours on the surface so it may have just turned
out to be a number of problems that probably ones that could not be avoided under the circumstances
that caused that lower paneled 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 have hurt the data too much
panel four was the one which uh 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 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 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
if i'd have known about it at the time uh we've got that pair of pliers out of there and pulled
harder the investigators opinion was it would have done well wouldn't have very severely jammed
and he doesn't think any additional effort would have would have uh would have freed it it was jam
pretty bad key 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 a plastic panel store where either they have calibration
plastic is in there and they'll be able to put the effect of the overheat is just to
reveal the fraction we do for the practices but with the calibration they'll be they got
most satisfactory experience 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
course there's a lot of panel four that isn't even involved in jamming that's true they'll still get
a lot of good things. 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 we really were careful uh to get it out of there and we didn't
once we got it loose we have to usual turn love and care and fold it up so i don't think there's any
crew fingerprints on a panel surface 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 it was very clean
and the PIs were very pleased with it. 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 on hand it was a small event but for this solar cycler 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.
Damn i'm curious about the uh dust meter kick stuff by the DPS um did you guys observe any dust on the
thing or any other part of the limb at that level because it's not it's always been our
pressure if it does to sit on the pretty thin layer should you don't get a pillow in our back
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 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 on it and i think they are going to attempt to chemically analyze the material i'll try to find
what it is
that first panel must be about chest height is it not
yeah any other questions one just one comment that was uh the frame of that thing was hot
really it was hot it was the only thing i felt through my gloves the whole
stay well it was jam 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
suppose that stuff to vacuum more
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
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 when this was accomplished with a bag that caused uh captain young a little bit of
trouble in the practices in advance but apparently worked all right on our surface it's great
the uh 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 with its gold surface it would have
heated up very rapidly but it didn't out in the full sunlight the accomplishments that uh i will
show you in a moment on the screen include the 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 if
anything we're 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 will be done with the big computer here at the MSC
so uh dr george cruthers who was the PI who designed a camera uh happened to be free the day
from work on an 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
the american photographers union in thanking 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 earth that uh shows a rural belt on the dark side you're looking at the earth with
the sun off to your right uh the south pole of the earth is down and that funny lip-like thing sticking
off to the left 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 auroral belt and disappears 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 sort of
well you know it's eight thousand miles cross
it is there's some halation here uh and i guess i'm not too sure and perhaps george knows
of this is a special eastman ntb3 emulsion very very thin and of course the exposure was made
with electrons not with light it's an electronographic camera but the dimension works out right you
can't see it too well on this print the um there's a ring or a 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 um the dimension you see there is two degrees across the full diameter
of the earth no you can't see through the earth no that uh the geometry is such that that is probably
inclined 30 degrees to the magnetic equator and is an unexpected auroral 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 pictures
hasn't been measured accurately is 30 degrees north
okay you'll notice on these pictures that they're over printed that's because i'm not a member of
the photographers union and the originals have a good deal more on them uh this picture was taken
excluding hydrogen light lamin alpha we have two filters on the camera and this one is taken in
light between the wavelengths of 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 one year 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 a few percent now in this one it's exactly the same view was taken after john so accurately
pointed the camera at the earth the earth is in the middle layer 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
uh 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
the little motor that uh danced the film between exposures didn't pull it quite far enough for
this one and uh those dust specks i guess are my pipe tobacco on the uh slides
uh 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 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 uh you'll notice that the shape of the geocorona
is as predicted by uh dr mire at the needle research line 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 pictures 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 eva's 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 uh hydrogen
in 12 16 engines line of alpha and the next slide shows the spectrum uh actually taken
on that first line the spectrum is dispersion is vertical and that white band across
horizontal roughly horizontally is line on 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 along that vertical
line from uh far ultraviolet down at the bottom to mirror ultraviolet up at the top
uh bright line just above line and alpha is 1304 which is an 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 uh by comparison with the laboratory spectrum made in the pre-flight calibrations
however we have uh tentatively identified uh the 584 line of helium the uh 834 line of atomic
of ionized oxygen the 1026 line uh lime and beta of hydrogen these three lines are uh the first
spectral measurements in the earth's upper atmosphere uh all previous measurements have been limited to
wavelengths long word of 1100 angstroms uh which we also cover and which includes the
lime and alpha line in 12 16 the 1304 and 13 56 lines of atomic oxygen and the lime and
bird's hop field bands of molecular nitrogen between 1200 and 1600 angstroms
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
as we uh expect though there will be much weaker than the lime and alpha line
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 magenta 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 line line alpha here is broader the definition is poorer but as Georgia
just saying uh we get uh lines further down than the ultraviolet on spectra taken without the correct
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 geochronica goes right across this slide
as I said last time by the way that's hundred thousand miles and the uh other lines here show the
either other materials in the geochrona or beyond the geochron I guess i'm gonna take a little while
to figure out which of which go ahead and get our options that I get more instead of the
the next two slides quickly show the slides right it's one then imagine any clouds which are
well John was worried about what the LMC meant and this is the large micron cloud and that's the
initial what the initial referred to uh the picture on the left is with hydrogen with line
and output and the picture on the right is without um in this far over by the region
all the juice are seen 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 regular
ionic clouds are nearby galaxies so we have a galaxy with all the stars and that means what
not spread out in front of us to study um now carl hannines there's a great special studies
these ionic clouds and it's very much interested in already has copies of these these photographs
that uh you notice that the hydrogen uh it's not just from the majority clouds and 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 when was that sticking which had us worried
you talked about the the instrument may fly on top of 17 rockworks very interested in
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
in possibly a 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 uh maybe the cold uh it just seemed to get
stickier and stickier toward the end there every time i had to every time i got to a new setting
in azimuth it completely destroyed the level and we're unfortunate and we're on that slope
right there it's under the foot pad of the limb and
so i had to go back and re-level it every time and that was uh we really working at the limits of the
level level ability of the of the machinery i think there and 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 and
they'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 it worked easily it would have would have uh remained level but i sure don't know what
it was no i i don't think we had any in fact i'm sure we didn't have any dust on the legs
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 bangs
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 what and i'm sure it got some dust on
it when i removed it though i got a little very small amount which i was legally keeping it
don't don't tell anybody the FBI will be around to see you
um so far we have not seen any discontinuity in the other side of the road which would be
the road that kind of made me think that it just sort of dribbles off but wait until you go somewhere
from the earth and there's no sharp problem but we're really not as far as the cold shock
uh tenor of the radio action has been in the middle of that uh i guess it's only it's only 10
12
okay any more questions?
okay next uh subject is the lunar geology investigation Dr. Mulverter
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
traversals 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 greenback at the end of the mission operations itself which was a summary as ever
knowledge at that time is based on crew observations tv and the pre-missioned data
included in that thing are station sample maps which are derived from the tv
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
by the end of last week we could receive black and white two-time enlargements of all film
these are the typical drug store quality prints and sooner or later we'll get 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 this infancy and i suspect should progress rapidly now that we got all this inventory
over with the guys took so damn many pictures 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 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 single frame from that
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're 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 justice all right prints never do well i mean
you really have to see it to believe it that white is so much wider than the contrast that we're
able to get out of the photographs then i think when i looked at it my assessment of this
uh which is kind of bad place was that it was a black ray coming out the right one 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
there's a bunch right there left edge yeah 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 that's one spectacular crater that that ray coming down the
south south right edge might have been the ray that made 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 right here
bill came right through stubby right up over and right out survey ridge this this one that was the
source of your terrific block field there man and uh just amazing how much rocks 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 had another EVA to find out it's a heat flow one
the the reason we call we were on a ray was really a an abundance 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 totally out of blocks to the south to the traverse to the south it
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 enough
to the crater or the crater shape was elongated or the or just a great spattering of craters as
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 field 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 it'd be
more blocks in fact as far as you could see it'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 down range from and it pointed right to the 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 uh in 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 uh of being black and white matrix black and white
rocks also the north ray rocks 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 room and can
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 or dark appearing materials very obvious
in the crater interior but i never recognized it as being a ray that was thrown out with a
radio 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 uh
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 rays
though i mean 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
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 would be south ray
checked as the principal source is one reason we wanted to move you on and i think that was a
good decision now that we look 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 that's type locality if you're part of the geological verage and you
can see the debris from there just scattered all out in here to the rovers back over here
yeah 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 the related to this are some of the
craters that you called indurated and had clots around them uh the guy at 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 hold turd kovatch tell us it was a very thick regolith here
which is what it should have had by the cratering stories and yet there was 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 no uh the indurated
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
plumb see those that outline of rocks down in there down no keep going down 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 was from down either in the bottom of plumb or or from the lower part of
uh flag was that rock 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 it could have been
from south ray or uh 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
not 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
so 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 i'm wondering i can't tell in these photographs
did you tell whether they're blocks over in there and therefore uh your impression of this streak
well cross it could not be salted by because you're looking down sun well i might have
it i didn't really mean to say south east 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
reconfirm that and 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 the bottom of buster is uh covered
with uh blocks that were up to two meters across and showed no orientation in any direction
not 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 and 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 it it has a appearance of a secondary from south ray in this kind of a photograph
you're in the description of you 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
was at least 50 meters at least yeah and uh the size of those blocks and the depth of that crater
and 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 that doesn't much too large to be
i don't really think it's a secondary so we're feeling that looking at it was the 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 in the walls great that spook didn't look like that at all this was
a lot fresher crater i didn't oversimplify 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 you know that's certainly one of the best candidates for yeah i just it's just
hard to imagine how the blocks would uh 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
well 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 stonemountain there was one other crater that we were looking
into as we were driving up stonemountain where we could see uh what looked to be more more like an
outroft 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 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 i would
hazard a guess that that was outcropped that was outcropped 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 the
field 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 our all white matrix rocks around
this way and and really right out from this little block here is house rock sits here and that is
predominantly a black matrix drop and and i counted nine radial block trails out of that crater
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 classical 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 uh we already commented it we couldn't even get
this palm to the shovel or the scoop in and around the rover which we're sitting right back out here
we've 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 to the bottom of it well wait until we get the pan camera stuff but look into the
bottom i guess no i or kens words on it as you can money going down there but i'd 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 rocks 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 can do you any things you'd want to point at them i've got that up there in the slide if you
want to it's lousy but it's i don't think it's 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
yeah 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 at 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 you didn't want to get close to that
beauty 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 it'd be to fall off at us for all their whole days
sorry that you'd get the conflate controllers mad because you didn't get back to the limb on time
you