Re: Stereo ON the moon?

[John Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 06:16:29 -0600
>From: Tim Smith <TSMITH@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Stereo ON the moon?

>...the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.  
>...There was a mock landscape with the lunar rover, some tools along 
>an very unusual device that one of the astronauts was holding.  The device 
>had a canister at the bottom (on the lunar ground).  Attached to the 
>canister was a long handle that came up to waist level that resembled an 
>upright vacuum cleaner.  After reading the information plaque I discover 
>that it was a stereo camera intended to take three dimensional images of 
>rocks and surface textures.  Does anyone know if this camera was actually 
>used and where these images may reside?  Very interesting.

That particular camera was a spare (the astronauts wouldn't have brought
it back from the moon), but one was used on Apollo 11, and perhaps other
missions. That's the Apollo Lunar Surface Closeup Camera (ALSCC), and the
main purpose of the camera was to get close-up photographs of the undisturbed
surface of the lunar soil. (When you think about it, the soil formation
processes on the moon have very little in common with those on Earth, so they
had no good way of predicting what the detailed soil structure would be like.)

Leon Kosofsky wrote the article "Lunar Stereo Photography" (including soil
images but no photo of the camera) for the December 1970 issue of the PSA
Journal, and it was reprinted in the July/August 1990 issue of Stereo World.
Presumably at least 100 stereo pairs exist - I don't have a reference to 
NASA image archives.

John R


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