Orbiter Beta Lunar surface textures installation

[Renegade]

Hello

I am struggeling some time to implement the Apollo_11_LS_textures_v1 (moon landing site textures), into Orbiter Beta. What ever I tried or do, I do not see these textures on the lunar surface, all I see are the installed Micro surface textures.

The Apollo_11_LS_textures_v1 directories contain different directories. Like Moon -> Surf -> dir 12, 13, 14 all the way up to 18 with different dds textures from different lunar landing sites

I have put these directory textures under Textures --- No result,
under Textures -> ProjectApollo --- No result
Under Textures2 -> No result

Where do I put these textures in Orbiter Beta...?

The other struggeling problem I have are the elv file extensions.

Under Textures -> Moon -> You have the Elev.tree and Surf.tree files

I have a lunar Elev and Surf directory containing dir 11, 12 all the way up to 17, containing dir 000044 and so on with 000130.elv file for example.

I have tried to put these Elev and Surf directories in ProjectApollo, or under Textures and Textures2 but --- No result

Where do I Put these Elev and Surf directories in Orbiter Beta, under which file structure...?

Any suggestion or help would be appreciated.

regards

 

[rcflyinghokie]

They should be just copy paste right into the structure within your "Textures" folder. Are you using the latest Orbiter beta and the latest d3d9 client for it?

 

[Max-Q]

Beware, even if you have them correctly installed and working, you may not see them... They cover the historical Apollo 11 site, and since Eagle landed long, the planned landing site (where NASSP will take you) will not be any different.

 

[ggalfi]

Where do I put these textures in Orbiter Beta...?

If you mean the textures from this URL: http://www.absimp.org/orbitersim/apollolandingsites.html then the zip files (both surface textures and elev) should be extracted into Orbiter's main folder, and everything will go to the proper place. Some additional setup may be requried, please see the URL above, or the txt descriptions contained in the zip files.

 

[Miriam]

Indeed, this where our perfect Orbiter universe comes back and bites us. Does anybody have the right coordinates for little west crater? AFAIK P64 presented it to Neil as landing point, so it should lead us near the real landing site. I've tried around, but couldn't find it, and as Luminary 099 doesn't have Noun 69, simply moving the landing point some miles downrange is rather complicated.

 

[Renegade]

They should be just copy paste right into the structure within your "Textures" folder. Are you using the latest Orbiter beta and the latest d3d9 client for it?

Thanks for the reply,

To answer your question..... Yes I have all the latest updates installed.

How is the correct file structure in orbiter, were do you install all the different data, for e.g. when you download the High resolutions of the moon, they are installed under Textures -> Moon -> Archive -> elev.tree and so on. The mesh data (.dds) is stored directly under Texture.

Were are all the different texture enhancements stored in orbiter, is it under Textures, Textures2, ApolloProjectNASSP. but no result so far.
I know I am missing something, but what?

Regards

 

[4throck]

These are the more precise (+-30cm for Apollo 11 LM) lunar coordinates I'm aware of:

Spacecraft Related Coordinates - 2016 Update

Luna 17, the intrepid lander that carried the Lunokhod 1 rover to the surface. You can make out the rover

lroc.sese.asu.edu

I think you can compute Little West crater location from there.

Don't know if something similar was done for Apollo 11, but for Apollo 17 lots of locations are determined:

Coordinates and Maps of the Apollo 17 Landing Site

Hasselblad surface photographs were registered to LROC NAC orthoimages Astronaut and instrument positions were determined by angular network adjustments A new Apollo 17 Traverse Map and large-scale...

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

 

[Miriam]

The problem is that we've different coordinate systems here and they don't match. In the days of Apollo, NASA used a different system then we use today, and that isn't the same Orbiter's textures think in.

 

[Renegade]

Thank you for the quick response !

On Youtube (see link

) is a video, made with Orbiter Beta with the enhanced textures for the moon landing. It's called Simulated Lunar Landing Apollo 11 (improved version). Those textures, I have downloaded, but when I implemented them in Orbiter Beta, I cannot see them. I have followed the excact instruction how to install them, but no succes. What am I missing ?

Regards

 

[4throck]

Orbiter uses the same coordinate system as on the link I provided. In scenarios the order is inverted (Lon Lat x Lat Lon) but the numbers are the same.

You can also get coordinates from the LROC interactive map:

QuickMap

quickmap.lroc.asu.edu

 

[Miriam]

Believe me: I've tried that, too. NASA's predicted landing site coordinates from the mission report won't work either. I've even tried to fly to what I thought was Little West manually -only to find out that it wasn't (and not having enough fuel to land safely in the end).

 

[n72.75]

I could be wrong, but I believe part of the issue here is that Eagle had a bit of unexpected DV on undocking due to tunnel pressure, which perturbed the stage vector without the LGC knowing about it.

Apollo Landing Site Coordinates

Unless I'm missing something...

 

[Miriam]

That's correct. It led to a downrange error of about 20000 ft. But here Luminary 099 is uncooperative and lacks the infamous Noun 69 which allowed for a landing site correction 'on the fly'. If it had that: well, piece of cake: V21N69E, +20000E and long you land. But it hasn't, so here we are again...?

 

[rcflyinghokie]

That's correct. It led to a downrange error of about 20000 ft. But here Luminary 099 is uncooperative and lacks the infamous Noun 69 which allowed for a landing site correction 'on the fly'. If it had that: well, piece of cake: V21N69E, +20000E and long you land. But it hasn't, so here we are again...?

You could always uplink a new landing site with RTCC MFD.

 

[Miriam]

As said: I've tried that. I don't know how many PDIs I have made with various coordinates from different sources -none of them brought me near Little West.

 

[rcflyinghokie]

As said: I've tried that. I don't know how many PDIs I have made with various coordinates from different sources -none of them brought me near Little West.

In all fairness you never said you changed and uplinked a new landing site with RTCC.

But you could also try getting the lat long from google moon.

 

[ggalfi]

Hi Miriam,

I have made a lot of effort on determining the connection between the Apollo-era coordinate system and the LROC's. I consider latter as reference and made my textures conformant to this. So in this sense, if you look up the coordinates of an object in the LROC data, then you will find that object at exactly the same coordinates in Orbitersim. E.g. Little West's coords are: E23.47561 N0.67431. The mission reports and also the flight plans give some hint on what coordinate systems were used back in Apolo times. It is differing from LROC with the magnitude of km, but even between two missions you may find a difference of 100m magnitude. So practically, if you want the LM to land at a certain spot, use the LROC coords of it, upload it as target LS through RTCC, and also set up a good SV before PDI and you may let it go.
I wanted to achieve some historical accuracy in case of Apollo 11, so I set up a scenario where the PGNS is set up for the original preflight landing site, but tweaked the LM's position and velocity till it'd land without crew action on the northern rim of the (larger) West Crater, as it happened in real life. I attached the scenario file, which is outdated for the current version of NASSP but you may use the MJD, LM position&velocity and PGNS memory content from it. If you set up correctly everything you should see at P64 something similar to this video: