call me pedantic but...
...Apollo 14 didn't have a lunar rover, just a handcart to carry their tools in. Apollo 15 was the first mission to have a lunar rover (or moon buggy if you prefer).
A long-lost Soviet solar/nuclear robot buggy - mislaid in the early 1970s - has been found on the moon by a NASA survey satellite. Soviet design pic of a Lunokhod rover packaged aboard its lander. Credit: NASA Old school. The vehicle in question is the Lunokhod 1 rover, which landed in the Mare Imbrium aboard the Luna 17 …
Is the good thing that they've found the SovRover or that having found it they can bunce their lasers off it.
Presumeably, if
1) we could get useful machinery to the moon
2) build some sort of living spaces there
3) get regular flights to the moon and back
you could bung a plaque on the ground next to it, and charge people to see it.
Space tourism WITH day-trips
im guessing the first reading should be to with in a kilometer?
"Using the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico, Murphy and his colleagues were able at last to get a laser reflection back from the missing moon-prowler, getting its range to within a centimetre. A second reading less than 30 minutes later gave another line of position and pinned the machine down to within 10 metres. In time, Murphy believes he can refine this down to within a centimetre."
The way I understood this was that the laser reflection gave a range of distance to the reflector on the buggy from the detector (of known location) accurate to within 1cm.
OK, so we know how far away it is, now what's it's geographical position? Bounce another laser off it, factor in rotation of earth/known motion of the moon, we now have pinned it's geographical location, from a possible resolution of 100m (mentioned in the article) to ten times that, down to within 10m of an exact fix. More measurements would mean greater resolution still, down to knowing the geographical position of the lander to within 1cm of accuracy, i.e within the diameter of the thing itself.
Always remember that probe from a space book I had as a child (in the seventies). For some reason, at the age of seven or eight, I thought it was something left over from a Victorian space mission :) Something Jules Verne would have designed...
Then again, looking at it, it does seem vaguely steampunk'ish...
"Using the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico, Murphy and his colleagues were able at last to get a laser reflection back from the missing moon-prowler, getting its range to within a centimetre. "
OK - now we have the range to 1cm
"A second reading less than 30 minutes later gave another line of position and pinned the machine down to within 10 metres."
A second reading is now LESS accurate?
" In time, Murphy believes he can refine this down to within a centimetre."
It reads like he had that on the first go.
Or am I a bit dim
[Not for publication - just a bug report as such!]
As someone mentioned earlier, the first pulse got them the range to the target which is only how far away it is. In theory it could be *anywhere* on the surface of a sphere of that radius, in practice it would be somewhere within the area illuminated by the laser, which is a spot several miles wide.
So one pulse only (to be said in a Sean Connery voice) gives you a very accurate distance, but no information about how far north/south or east/west it is. A second pulse a bit later gives you a second very accurate range, and a bit of basic triangulation turns your two ranges into an approximate position and reduces the east/west error a lot (due to the rotation of the earth) and the north/south error rather less. That's where the 10m figure comes from.
Ideally they now want results from an observatory in the southern hemisphere to reduce the north/south error as well.
the Register is English and thus not compelled to make everything easily understood on a first read. The earlier post covered the apparent discrepancy well enough, though you might have missed it due to moderation delay. don't look now, merely consider the terms "range" and "position", and that, as per usual the article is correct as written.
"am i a bit dim? " - not really, inattentive maybe... What state are you from?
""" "Using the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico, Murphy and his colleagues were able at last to get a laser reflection back from the missing moon-prowler, getting its range to within a centimetre. "
OK - now we have the range to 1cm
"A second reading less than 30 minutes later gave another line of position and pinned the machine down to within 10 metres."
A second reading is now LESS accurate?"""
The first reading was _distance_, the second _distance_ reading (also presumably accurate to 1cm) narrowed down the _position_ to within 10 meters. Can nobody tell the difference between the _distance_ between two points and a relative _position_ in multiple dimensions?
"""Or am I a bit dim"""
Clearly you're no rocket scientist.
The shadows are consistent.
The light source (Sun) is in roughly the 4 o'clock position in relation to the photograph, thus the lander, being higher than the surrounding area, casts a shadow points towards the 10 o'clock position. Most of the other shadows are being created by craters, which are LOWER than the surrounding area, so their shadows are being created by the crater rims and are cast in the same direction as the lunar lander's.
Now dear Register,
tell me how the thing you have in the photo is supposed to "rove" ? No wheels, not tracks. Can't be a "lunar Harrier" as the atomsphere is rather dense up there :-)
Some googleing says THIS is the Lunkohod 1:
http://lexikon.astronomie.info/php/image.php?image=http://lexikon.astronomie.info/mond/img/lunukhod1.jpg