Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Looking for moon junk

Space.com has an interesting article about Philip Stooke's five-year mission to seek out human spacecraft on the moon.
"I've devoted almost all my time in the last five years to my Atlas of Lunar Exploration, which is in the final stages now," Stooke told SPACE.com. Part of his research is focused on tracking down the whereabouts of decades-old mooncraft and identifying craters caused by human-made objects. One might think the locations would be well-charted.

But spacecraft were "lost" because they were never found initially, Stooke said. There are those craft that came to rest on the lunar surface, with their positions known to within about 6 or 12 miles (10 or 20 kilometers), figured out by tracking a spacecraft's signals during descent.