reply to post by ckitch
Yet again....more ignorance:
Note the lack of dust on the landing feet. This thing would have kicked up a storm with its engines.
Firstly....in that photo, HOW do you expect to be able to see any Lunar regolith particles that had collected in the landing gear pads??? Wouldn't
you have to get up real close?
Secondly......the amount of loose soil that could actually be displaced depended on the force of the effort.....an Astronaut's boot kicking it up is
a DIRECT IMPACT form a solid object (his FOOT!!!)
Compared to the much, much lesser forces of the diffuse descent engine (ONE engine, not "engines") exhaust gasses.
The engine nozzle diameter was
54 inches! AND, the engine was NOT at full throttle, at the point of the landing. IN fact, it is throttled
well down, about 10 - 15 % of maximum thrust. Also, the landing procedure was that the engine would be stopped as soon as the "Contact" light
illuminated.....this was from one of three 6-foot long probes mounted on the bottom of three landing legs....they would detected surface contact, and
the spacecraft could then settle down, from that height, even as the engine was being shut down. (Shut-down was NOT immediate, in any event).
THIRDLY.....you keep saying "dust". SAND would be a better description...fine sand grains. (ALTHOUGH, don't make the mistake of taking "sand"
literally. Lunar regolith is very different. I am talking about particle size).
It wasn't like flour. or talcum powder.
AND, the word "dust" also makes people think of they way "dust" behaves on Earth, that they're familiar with....where we have AIR! In a vacuum,
the debris behaves differently. It cannot "billow" and be carried aloft on air, as on Earth...NO AIR! So, when disturbed by engine exhaust, it
tended to take the only logical path....OUTWARDS radially. Not "UP", and thus, not much would be able to get high enough to get into the cupped
landing pads.
See the filmed landings, from the 16 mm DAC mounted in the LMP window. The regolith disturbance is evident, and obvious in its behavior:
@ about 50 feet above the surface (1:50 in that video time reference) you can see the ground is being affected. IN FACT....a whole lot of the LOOSEST
soil is being moved away from the landing sight, at this point!!!! Beneath it, the harder, heavier particles are less disturbed. AND, the majority
of the Lunar surface is "hard-packed". It's not like an ocean beach, here on Earth. (Unless you are talking about a beach with only a few
centimeters of loose soil, above a hard-packed surface).