Actions for Restoration of the Apollo Heat Flow Experiments Metadata

Email RIS file
Bookmark
Report an Issue

Restoration of the Apollo Heat Flow Experiments Metadata

Author
Hills, H. K.
Published
March 16, 2015.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Stephens, M. K., Williams, D. R., Taylor, P. T., Nagihara, S., and Nakamura, Y.
Online Version

Availability

I Want It
I Want It

Finding items...

Restrictions on Access
Unclassified, Unlimited, Publicly available.
Free-to-read Unrestricted online access
Summary
Geothermal heat flow probes were deployed on the Apollo 15 and 17 missions as part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). At each landing site, the astronauts drilled 2 holes, 10-m apart, and installed a probe in each. The holes were 1- and 1.5-m deep at the Apollo 15 site and 2.5-m deep at the Apollo 17 sites. The probes monitored surface temperature and subsurface temperatures at different depths. At the Apollo 15 site, the monitoring continued from July 1971 to January 1977. At the Apollo 17 site, it did from December 1972 to September 1977. Based on the observations made through December 1974, Marcus Langseth, the principal investigator of the heat flow experiments (HFE), determined the thermal conductivity of the lunar regolith by mathematically modeling how the seasonal temperature fluctuation propagated down through the regolith. He also determined the temperature unaffected by diurnal and seasonal thermal waves of the regolith at different depths, which yielded the geothermal gradient. By multiplying the thermal gradient and the thermal conductivity, Langseth obtained the endogenic heat flow of the Moon as 21 mW/m(exp 2) at Site 15 and 16 mW/m(exp 2) at Site 17.
Other Subject(s)
Collection
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) Collection.
Note
Document ID: 20150004428.
GSFC-E-DAA-TN20946.
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference; 16-20 Mar. 2015; The Woodlands, TX; United States.
Terms of Use and Reproduction
Copyright, Distribution as joint owner in the copyright.
View MARC record | catkey: 15415183