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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Today, a new topic: Chinese lunar missions. We will look at past flights and future plans. There have been 6 main missions and 3 others, a test flight and two relay satellites, plus some small additional spacecraft. It's complicated and hard to keep up with. The first lunar mission suggestion I […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

Today we begin a new story about the exploration of Phobos and Deimos. As I mentioned yesterday this is a bit of background for a new mission, Japan's MMX (Mars Moon Explorer), which will launch later this year. I will look at missions to Phobos and Deimos, actual or suggested. Some maps of […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

Time for a new topic... Mars Pathfinder. It was NASA's first Mars lander after Viking and very much a low budget endeavour in comparison with that great flagship mission. Some people thought that was a bad idea - that NASA or Congress might get a taste for small cheap missions and jeopardize […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2026

My Moon Chronicle has now been updated with part 8 - and I have added a link to my Moon landing and impact sites map. Work on part 9 is just starting. Enjoy! publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/moon-chron… #moon #maps

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/04/2026

I am starting a new topic today. As suggested yesterday it deals with commercial lunar missions (a loosely defined term here!), and much of it will be taken up with the Google Lunar X Prize, a textbook example of how not to plan lunar exploration or almost anything else. I start with a few […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/03/2026

Today I will begin a look at thoughts about human exploration of the Moon after Apollo, skimming over some earlier things but leading up to where we are now, planning for Artemis landings within a few years, possibly as soon as early 2028 (but still some big hurdles to jump before that can […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

Slight change of plan - tomorrow the lunar site selection begins. Today, a preview of my LPSC poster. I compare LROC-NAC and OHRC images of some landing sites - OHRC has 4x the resolution of typical LROC-NAC images at the moment. At first NAC had a resolution of 50 cm/pixel from 50 km but now it […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

@ollopa11.bsky.social LRO already has full coverage of the area, no need for more images. But there is better to come. India's Chandrayaan 2 with the superb OHRC camera (25 cm/pixel) has plans to image the site.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

@ollopa11.bsky.social Leo, I have been communicating with Egorov. I have seen a lot of these suggestions over the years. Most do not stand up to any scrutiny. This one is a bit better but i am not fully convinced by it yet.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/01/2026

Last September I started a thread on Viking 1 which began with the Viking site selection process. Here we will pick up the story for Viking 2. Viking sites were chosen initially using Mariner 9 images and elevation data, and he final stage of that process […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Two maps of parts of Mars which were chosen for the Viking 2 landing site during 1975. At left is site B1 in Cydonia at 44 degrees north. It seemed to consist of sedimentary plains (wind and water deposition) in a broad lowland with occasional hills and craters. B2 is on Alba Mons, a very broad low volcanic rise north of Tharsis. Lava flows have been incised by small probably water-cut channels. But images from the Viking orbiters would cast doubt on their safety.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/01/2026

Section 7 of the Moon Chronicle is now available. Download it, share it, do what you like with it (but it's only for free distribution). publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/moon-chron… Section 8 is in progress now.

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Reposted by Phil Stooke

Mina @mina.berlin.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/01/2026

Astonishing #Math fact: 2026 = 1⁰ + 2⁰ + 3⁰ + … + 2025⁰ + 2026⁰

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

Happy New Year everyone. Normal service will resume on January 1.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2025

Time for a new topic. We will look at Viking 2 later. Pop quiz - which was the first solar system object after Earth and he Moon to be mapped? You at the back? - sorry, it's not Mars. No, the first after Earth and the Moon was Venus, by Francesco Bianchini […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A map of Venus published in 1728 by Francesco Bianchini. It is in gores which could be cut out and pasted onto a sphere. All features are optical illusions. Is a map of fictitious features a map? Yes.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2025

Here is the state of the sample field at sol 300 in the Viking 1 mission. Only events since the time of the previous map are labelled. This was the first mission which I tried to document like this, step by step, and it set the pattern for all subsequent […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A map of the Viking 1 sampler field at sol 300 of the mission. It shows the area accessible to the arm, and all the trenches and other events performed by the arm. Below it is a photo from the lander perspective showing the same features.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2025

Time for a new thread. I have been wanting to look at something very different which would not normally be associated with me... but it will take some setting up, so it will come later. For now, I want to look at the amazing Viking Lander missions. After Apollo, Viking was the next giant leap […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2025

Today I am starting a series of posts on recent lunar missions. We have had a few since my previous Moon sequence. But I will start with a correction to part of my previous set - it's Luna 20. andr59 - this is for you! Looking back, I was puzzling over the locations of the horizon details as I […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2025

Earlier we saw a map of hydrothermal sites around Tharsis suggested by James Dohm. The combination of warmth and water seemed promising in the search for life (or past life). Here are more of them, suggested in 2 studies in 2005 and 2007. These are not tied […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A map of Mars in 2 hemispheres showing two sets of hydrothermal sites suggested in 2005 and 2007. Among them are impact crater sites in which impact-generated heat and water combine to form a potentially habitable environment. Among them are Gusev and Gale craters which hosted rovers (Gusev before the studies, Gale afterwards).

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2025

Apologies - I am busy with the Resilience crash scene investigation, back on the job tomorrow.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2025

Those landers are supposed to lie on big circles, but they might not look like it because of the map projection. I like the 2 hemisphere look so I use it a lot but I admit it is not the best for these network maps. But other projections have problems too so we are staying with this one. We've […]

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2025

Intermarsnet had many potential sites but only 3 would be used, optimized for seismology. Robert Haberle (NASA Ames) proposed augmenting it with several mini-landers for meteorology, with a much larger latitude range: the Micro-Meteorological Network. The […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A map of Mars in 2 hemispheres showing the distribution of landers for a proposed mission called Micro-Meteorological Network. It would augment Intermarsnet (which ostensibly studied meteorology but was optimized for seismicity) by extending basic weather observations to many more sites. The landers would fall on 2 large circles offset by the planet's rotation between deployments.

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Phil Stooke @philstooke.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

Today we start a new theme... drum roll... I want to look at Mars missions which never happened. Over the last 75 years there have been many ideas about missions to Mars, and I want to explore some of them that didn't fly. I'm a cartographer so the focus is on maps of mission plans, not […]

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