4
$\begingroup$

There are a lot of (now historic) landing sites on the moon. You can see a great review of them in this answer to the question How many extraterrestrial bodies have hosted a “lander” which returned images?

One is actually an historic re-visit to a previous lander. For more on that see How did Apollo-12 manage to land next to Surveyor-3? First “Space-Tourists”? and answers therein.

I remember something about a proposed "small sat" mission to the Moon to photograph some of them from orbit and transmit the images back to earth, "verifying" that they are real with (even more) photographic evidence. I believe it was proposed on a Russian analog to Kickstarter or the like. I think there was some discussion in this site, something about encryption and validation, but I can't find it now.

And I think one of the participants in the now-expired X-prize competition had proposed a rover to do something similar. But I don't keep up.

Question: (What happened to the) Plans to visit and/or document sites of previous lunar landings? Are any active now?

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
2
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ What is the meaning of "to revisit sites" here, a lander or an orbiter? An orbiter would need a very special trajectory to get very close to a historic landing site without crashing on the surface due to the MASCONs. A lander or even a rover should not modify the historic landing site in any way. But how close is possible without modification? $\endgroup$
    – Uwe
    May 8, 2018 at 10:27
  • $\begingroup$ @Uwe thank for your comment! I've edited and changed to "visit and/or document". The goal of my question is to just find out what plans have existed or exist now, not to justify or critique them. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 8, 2018 at 10:29

0

Reset to default

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.