The 6 Apollo landing sites are a little hard to examine up close and personal right now. Even using high resolution imagery from orbit won't give you much of the kind of information that you need. For that, you need to examine samples in labs under electron microscopes. I doubt we'll develop a sample return capability via unmanned spacecraft, and by the time we get the ability to go there with humans, the point will be moot. All of the critical design decisions will have been made for the future systems. Besides, some want to preserve at least some of those original landing sites as historic monuments.
I've also wondered how intact the Lunar Module descent stages are after all of this time. Each of them had some residual propellant on board when they landed. They've endured hundreds of hard freeze/thaw cycles over the decades. I wonder if the propellant lines have ruptured. If so, then the hypergolic propellants might have come in contact with one another, resulting in a fire that could possibly cause the tanks to rupture. Even if only one of the hypergolic propellant lines leaked, that could cause some serious corrosion. It's possible that there might not be a lot of the LM descent stages left other than the landing gear legs.
Some of this speculation depends on how the propellant latch values are configured to the tanks. If the valves were connected directly to the tanks, then the lines were probably empty and freezing wouldn't be an issue except for the valves themselves. If the valves were configured on lines from the tanks, then freezing was more likely. Hydrazine doesn't expand as it freezes like water. However, if the line if frozen solid and melts unevenly, then you can get a ruptured line due to the melted portion being blocked by frozen hydrazine. The expanding melted liquid might exhert enough pressure to rupture the line. Satellites use propellant line heaters to keep this from happening. However, all power was exhausted on the LM descent stages decades ago.
Space/Science » in reply to LLDEF
re: LLDEF
The whole thread (27 posts)
- A silent explosion...
- Don't worry, it was about 25 kilos [55 Ibs] of dynamite.
- re: Not the point....
- LLDEF
- re: LLDEF already there: Surveyor 3
- re: LLDEF
- re: LLDEF
- Predictions from the Apollo era were that those footprints would last for at least a million years
- Observations
- ALSEP
- LLDEF
- re: Not the point....
- re: Moon Impacts
- Don't worry, it was about 25 kilos [55 Ibs] of dynamite.
