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Ethan, enjoyed your physics lesson about hitting a golf ball off the Moon. At the end you wrote: [i]Now, if only there were some good way to find that ball in the great sand trap that is the Moon's surface...[/i] Your write-up was picked up by io9.com, where Alasdair Wilkins (copied on this e-mail) noted: [i]Shepard's shot likely wasn't quite perfect enough to make it that far, but he probably was right in his initial observation that the ball went over a mile into the distance.[/i] In fact, Shepard hit two golf balls and the location of both are known. One was even photographed after being hit. Neither traveled anywhere close to a mile. The first ball, which he described as going "Miles and miles and miles" landed in what came to be known as Javelin crater. It was photographed through the window of the lunar module before the astronauts left the surface of the Moon. You can [URL=http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/a14det9337.jpg]see the golf ball[/URL] laying just south of the 'javelin' which gave the small crater its name. The 'javelin' was the Solar Wind Collector staff, which fellow moonwalker Ed Mitchell threw as a make-shift javelin. In a post-flight interview, Alan Shepard said the second ball he hit fell near where they deployed Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, or ALSEP. You can [URL=http://collectspace.com/review/lrolcross_conecrater02-lg.jpg]see the layout[/URL] of the Apollo 14 landing site as as overlay of the imagery taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2009. The ALSEP was deployed less than 200 meters from the lunar module. 'Javelin' crater is much closer. Here's [URL=http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/AS14-66-9337HR.jpg]the full frame shot[/URL] from the lunar module window. So we know exactly where one ball is and the general vicinity of the other, neither having traveled miles...
[i]Now, if only there were some good way to find that ball in the great sand trap that is the Moon's surface...[/i]
[i]Shepard's shot likely wasn't quite perfect enough to make it that far, but he probably was right in his initial observation that the ball went over a mile into the distance.[/i]
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