LPSC: Mad or NASA?
The wonderfully named Wendell Mendell, manager for office of human exploration science at Johnson Space Center, talked at the end of the day about making sure that science capabilities were included in the lunar exploration architecture. His talk didn't include many slides, but he did have one with three statements. Two, he said, came from official NASA documents. And one came from Mad magazine. Wendell wouldn't reveal which was which, but I was still amused trying to guess.
A) The problem on landing on the lunar dark side is that terrain is usually dark.
B) Washout: high light angles do not allow reflected light to reach the eye.
C) Althouth the Moon is 1/49th the size of the Earth, it is farther away.