[FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3

[David Portree]

Paolo & Larry:

 

The large mare in the southern hemisphere looks to be centered awfully close to where South Pole-Aitken is, and the size of it is similar, too. Did Wilkins (a volcanism proponent, if I recall correctly) provide a rationale for putting a mare just there?

David S. F. Portree

dsfportree at hotmail.com
dportree at usgs.gov
 
http://beyondapollo.blogspot.com/
 
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/About/People/DavidPortree/
 



 


From: ljk4 at msn.com
To: paolo.ulivi at tiscali.it; fpspace at friends-partners.org
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:21:46 -0400
Subject: Re: [FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3



I forgot to add the book was from circa 1956.
 
Larry
 


From: ljk4 at msn.com
To: paolo.ulivi at tiscali.it; fpspace at friends-partners.org
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:20:14 -0400
Subject: Re: [FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3



I once saw a World Book Encyclopedia entry on the Moon which made a guess at the
appearance of the lunar farside.  Though I no longer have access to that book, I recall
they predicated a number of small maria scattered across the surface.  Not sure about
the numbers of types of craters, but it was not a mirror image of the near side.
 
Thanks for sharing.
 
Larry

 


Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:14:56 +0200
From: paolo.ulivi at tiscali.it
To: fpspace at friends-partners.org
Subject: [FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3

Speaking of the first pictures of the farside of the Moon, released by the Soviet Union 50 years ago these days, I have unearthed a paper from my collection of vintage space magazines predicting what the farside would look like. The paper is "The Other Side of the Moon" by the experienced selenographer H Percy Wilkins (the discoverer of Mare Orientale) published in the January 1953 issue of the JBIS.
I have put Wilkins' map of the farside here: http://i83.servimg.com/u/f83/11/13/59/33/farsid10.gif Although he was completely wrong in predicting the presence of large maria, he did a remarkable work of back-tracing young rays on the lunar limb to the farside, where he found that they converged to nine craters. I believe that one of them was Giordano Bruno. 		 	   		  
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