Realistic topographic models
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Journey to Descartes with APOLLO 16 in april 1972:
Revealing the Secrets of the Lunar Highlands - Model, Apollo and LROC images |
Painting the model |
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The model of the Descartes mountains and the surrounding Cayley Plain is on a scale of 1:10000, or 1 cm in the model is 100 meters on the moon. The model is 1.2 x 1.2 meters and covers a lunar area of 12 x 12 kilometers. Marker pins in the landscape show the stations during the three EVA's over three days.
At first glance, this area may seem less spectacular than the Apollo 15 and 17 since the mountains rise only a few hundred meters above the plains.
But, the more we study this site, the more fascinating it gets for many reasons. The most spectacular features in this landscape are the "fresh" South Ray crater (2-3 million years old) with extremely prominent ejecta rays, and the deep (150-200 meters) North Ray crater, both excavating deep into the Cayley plains.
The highlands on the moon are very rugged landscapes with undulating mountain ranges a few hundred meters tall, surrounded or filled in by "plains" (previously called "upland fill"). The plains are also very rugged areas (they are not plane at all), and it would have been next to impossible to navigate without the Rover navigation system.
Before Apollo 16, the consensus was that the highland areas were volcanic in origin. This view changed dramatically during and after the Apollo 16 mission.
The highlands are probably ejecta from the larger basins, and very likely the Nectaris basin to the east played an important role for the buildup of these rugged highlands in the Descartes region, south of Mare Tranquillitatis. Still, the Highlands keep many geological mysteries, and we need to go back to the moon also for this reason.
During EVA 2, Young and Duke drove up the slope of Stone Mountain to the south, near the Cincos craters, setting an altitude record of about 200 meters above the plains! A bold John Young suggested to drive further up the mountain, to the larger Crown crater, but the team finally settled near the Cincos.
At North Ray crater vistited during EVA 3 to the north, Young and Duke explored the spectacular House Rock, as large as a house, and most probably tossed out of the depths of North Ray millions of years ago. On their way back to the lunar module Orion, shielded (from the solar wind) regolith material from below "Shadow Rock" was sampled. EVA 3 was cut short due to time limitations, and the original plan was to continue to the smaller Cat crater near the rim of Ravine crater, on the slope of Smoky Mountain. Ravine, Cat and Smoky has to wait a while longer for human explorers. For how long?