Attractions can have a good influence, It can bring together entities, random entities and create something meaningful, something intricate, something important, something powerful, yet fragile out of them.
The mascons detail is fascinating, basically ancient impact scars that still mess with spacecraft orbits millions of years later. The GRAIL twin-spacecraft interferometry approach was genius for mapping this, way more precise than just tracking doppler shifts. The part about Apollo needing to program perturbation models into their guidance computers based on Lunar Orbiter data really shows how close we were to landing in the wrong spot if we hadnt figured this out beforehand.
At the time of Apollo, engineers did their absolute best. It was only after the GRAIL mission that we were able to map gravitational inconsistencies in such minute detail. Our Moon is still full of hidden surprises for sure.
The mascons detail is fascinating, basically ancient impact scars that still mess with spacecraft orbits millions of years later. The GRAIL twin-spacecraft interferometry approach was genius for mapping this, way more precise than just tracking doppler shifts. The part about Apollo needing to program perturbation models into their guidance computers based on Lunar Orbiter data really shows how close we were to landing in the wrong spot if we hadnt figured this out beforehand.
At the time of Apollo, engineers did their absolute best. It was only after the GRAIL mission that we were able to map gravitational inconsistencies in such minute detail. Our Moon is still full of hidden surprises for sure.