Color-balancing of in Situ Documentation Photographs of the Apollo 17 Orange and Apollo 15 Green Volcanic Ashes
Year: 2018
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Slide #1 (Title Slide; also see "Endnote", final slide): Several papers today have mentioned the "Legacy of Apollo".I want to address a specific legacy that has been grossly distorted for almost a half century.Let me begin by reading the first sentence of the abstract: "Seven photographs of a trench dug across an orange tinted, oval area on the rim of Shorty Crater at Station 4 by Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt documented one of the most remarkable discoveries of the Apollo program."Slide #3: But for decades after the photos of the trench were returned to the Earth, except for a few die-hard geochemists and geologists who examined the colored glass beads, people found it hard to get excited because the printed photographs (e.g., see Apollo 17 Preliminary Science Report, NASA SP-330, 1973) and later digital scans showed mostly a muddy view like that at left, which has been available in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal for 15 years.Or even like the one on the right, available on Kipp Teague's Project Apollo Archive website since 2015, the original untouched scan direct from JSC. (NASA photo AS17-137-20990).Pan D-11 LRV park spot green soil sample area Slide #43: An overhead view of Spur Crater at 28 cm/px resolution.Red arrow marks the large rim boulder.The vertical arrow denotes the green soil sampling area.The site of Irwin's Pan D-11 is marked at right and the rover parking spot is just below that.
Authors: Tranquillity Enterprises, s.p., Ronald A. Wells, Harrison H. Schmitt
Language: English
Subfield: Space and Planetary Science
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2903085703