Traverse Planning for Robotic Recon and Human Exploration of Hadley Rille

Abstract

On November 6, 2008, we conducted a short lunar traverse planning exercise at the NASA Ames Research Center. The objective was to establish an initial EVA traverse plan for a hypothetical, manned mission to the Apollo 15 region and then to identify where ground-level data (e.g., collected by robotic recon) would help refine the plan. The planning for this mission, which we named “Apollo 15B”, focused on Hadley Rille near Hadley C, and the ejecta blanket from Hadley C that is deposited on to Hadley Rille. During the exercise, we used a variety of lunar datasets including recent high-res digital scans of Apollo Metric Camera (AMC) images, digital elevation models (created from the AMC images using the Ames StereoPipeline), and other datasets (geologic map, Clementine UV-VIS data, etc.) for planning. All the datasets were registered to the ULCN 2005 control network and viewed in a version of the Google Earth geospatial browser, which we modified to provide lunar distance measurements.