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Believe it or not, there is indeed a MOCR (Mission Operations Control Room) on the moon, at the valley of Taurus-Littrow, slightly to the east-southeast of the landingsite of Apollo 17's LM Challenger between Camelot and Sherlock craterlets. This MOCR is the largest one of the small bowl shaped craterlets on the dark colored floor between the Sculptured hills and the South massif. As we all know, today's telescopic photographs of the lunar surface, made from Earth, look very much as if they were made by probes orbiting the moon, which means... I believe it should be possible to make telescopic photographs of the MOCR at the Taurus-Littrow valley. Alas, none of Apollo 17's Hasselblad photographs, made at the floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley, show the MOCR (or at least a vague trace of it). I have investigated each and every one of the photographs made during Apollo 17's third and last excursion at the base of the North Massif (with the Split Rock, or Tracy's Rock, as the highlight of this excursion), but... nothing found in southeastern direction, although Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and their LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle) stood on the slope of the North Massif (much higher than the floor of the valley). Let me know if you have telescopic photographs of the Taurus-Littrow valley which also show the MOCR. Of the same "genre" of nomenclature is the SWP crater at the base of the Sculptured hills. SWP = Science Working Panel. |
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Believe it or not, Thanks for giving me the choice. I don't, because it's not true. |
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| Well, that's how NASA called that craterlet: MOCR (Mission Operations Control Room). See also the online Apollo Lunar Surface Journal from Eric Jones and Kipp Teague. |
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| I don't get what you mean, the MOCR was a Room in the Control Building on earth. |
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Yes that's true, but somehow the crew of Apollo 17 and some technicians of NASA decided to call the largest one of the small craterlets on the floor of Taurus-Littrow MOCR (Mission Operations Control Room). I (myself) want to get each and every nickname of all the craterlets and other surface formations which were visited by all twelve astronauts of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. And there are also the nicknamed landmarks and larger surface formations such as Mount Marilyn (Secchi Theta) several hundreds of kilometers eastward of the landingsite of Apolo 11. The largest one of the NASA-related nicknamed surface formations is THE HELMET north of Agatharchides and east of Gassendi, with the small hillock Herigonius Eta in (or on) its most northern section. With some imagination one could indeed see something like a Formule-1 helmet in it. The diameter of THE HELMET is a little more than 50 kilometers. |
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Okay, sorry if I misunderstood you, but that's just confusing.  |
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The astronaut-and-NASA jargon was, during the heydays of Apollo, mostly confusing, because in those days there was no such thing as "interaction" of NASA and the public (I hate it how the public is called "Joe Public"). I do understand why the television broadcasting companies stop'd transmitting the live TV pictures from Apollo 16 because during each one of the Apollo missions the astronauts didn't talk to the audience. It was all between the astronauts and NASA. No wonder the public (the audience) ask'd questions such as: What the hell are they doing up there? What are they talking about? (all what was seen on television was a couple of dirty snowmen leaning forward to dig up some soil, and that was it, sometimes laughing because of some NASA-ese joke). I remember my mother when she was watching the mission of Apollo 14 in 1971. Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell were strolling somewhere in the distance between the rocks and boulders on the slope of Cone crater. My mother: All I saw was a couple of tiny white blobs. It was a very strange era, the Apollo project. To get a feeling of "wistful afterthoughts", one should listen to Philip Glass's Facades on his album Glassworks (1982), and simultaneously watching the Hasselblad photographs made by the Apollo astronauts, especially the black-and-white photographs which show the distant mountains of the Hadley site (Apollo 15). To get a real feeling of, say, the "grandeur" (or something equal) of Apollo 15's lunar mountains (Hadley Delta, the Swann range, the Saint George crater), please listen to the very impressive ending (outro) of Terry Riley's Embroidery (on his album Songs for the 10 voices of the 2 prophets, 1982). Although... Gene Cernan (commander of Apollo 17) tried to bring the public closer to Apollo (visitors were allowed to take a good look at the LEVA training of both Cernan and Schmitt, somewhere on terrestrial soil, there was even a tourbus involved). |
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| @Danny Caes I also initially thought you were spouting off wild conspiracy theories, so I did some digging. Really cool fact to know! Anyways, I dug through pictures on Astrobin of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, and found at least two shots showing MOCR Crater: Taurus - Littrow Valley (Andrea Vanoni) - AstroBin has it very prominently, with nice relief on the crater rim Apollo 17 landing site (Fábio) - AstroBin also has it, and a really good shot of Bear Mountain, that was obscured by shadow in the other link. They were shot with 12" and 16" scopes, respectively. |
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Thanks Chris! I take a close "Sherlock Holmes'esque" look! £$§%& ?!?! What? Me? Wild conspiracy theories? No no, nothing like that! Although, I must say... (WARNING: this is extremely off topic!), I want to believe that... (dear readers... here it comes...), that Tangerine Dream's album Rubycon (1974) is, in fact, a musical rendition of an unexpected subterranean encounter with a technologically far advanced unknown society (a small group of speleologists is investigating weird cavities deep below Earth's surface, but... suddenly they go through some sort of portal and stand in the midst of a large subterranean city full of technologically far advanced transportation crafts hovering in the air between the, eh... "ground" below and "ceiling" a couple of kilometers above them. Part 1 of Rubycon is, what I call, the Great Lesson (the speleologists are invited to learn everything about this unknown subterranean society, but... after the lesson they are forced to stay underground because they know too much), and Part 2 is, what I call the Great Escape (the speleologists are trying to get back to the surface, but... they are caught by the subterraneans and are forced to go through a hypnotic treatment to forget all what they saw and what they learned (near the end of Rubycon Part 2 the hypnotized speleologists are dropped somewhere on a beach near the sea, and can't remember what they were doing the time after they investigated the weird cavities, they are puzzled!). Of course, this is ASTROBIN, not a place to discuss musical impressions, but... you know... Danny's weird thoughts P.S.: Anyone of you ever had a dream of some sort of sky made of a gigantic slowly moving "grid" of numerous tubes and cables? In between these tubes and cables something of the "ceiling" is visible, just like in some sort of huge factory. All of this is illuminated by a bright yellowish/orange-ish pointlike lightsource very near the horizon. Airplanes could "hang" on the tubes and travel along with the "ceiling" without consuming fuel. It is known that Edmond Halley (of Halley's comet) had a hypothesis of different levels inside our planet Earth. In other words, the ground (Earth's surface) on which we are walking is not the only one, there are much more grounds deep below. From Wikipedia (Edmond Halley): - In 1692, Halley put forth the idea of a hollow Earth consisting of a shell about 500 miles (800 km) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core. He suggested that atmospheres separated these shells, and that each shell had its own magnetic poles, with each sphere rotating at a different speed. Halley proposed this scheme to explain anomalous compass readings. He envisaged each inner region as having an atmosphere and being luminous (and possibly inhabited), and speculated that escaping gas caused the aurora borealis. He suggested, "Auroral rays are due to particles, which are affected by the magnetic field, the rays parallel to Earth's magnetic field." |
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Danny Caes: No, but I had a dream of a Face Hugger/6-legged-spider-bat eating dog food from my dog's food bowl, then running after me out of my house... Oh, and then I started flying over a highway, like a bird... |
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Speaking of flying in dreams. It never happened to me, but... the frequent sensation or "gift" to levitate several centimeters above the ground is not a rarity. Also: running and jumping without landing, or trying to land many meters beyond the normal landing point (to try to hover above the ground as long as possible). Standing in some sort of deep pit and trying to push yourself (your whole body) out of it, to reach ground level. The same is seen near the end of George Lucas's THX 1138, when "TEX" is crawling upward through the vertical tubeway, all the way toward Earth's surface to avoid the mindless chrome robots (the "police") way below him. By the way, unknown technologically advanced societies way below Earth's surface appeared in, for example Atlantis Mystery by Edgar P. Jacobs (the adventures of Blake and Mortimer), and also in Roger Leloup's Yoko Tsuno albums (several large subterrestrial cavities are occupied by the intergalactic lightblue colored people from the planet Vinea in the galaxy Messier 33 in Triangulum). |
