Originally Posted by
DuncanDoenitz
Obviously, greater intelligence than my feeble brain is inventing this stuff, but we see three actual/potential landers standing upright on an unprepared, lunar, brownfield site.
Apollo 16 missed a huge crater by sheer luck. John Young and Charlie Duke flew over a rather large crater which was obscured by exhaust blown dust, landing just beyond it. The first they knew of the crater was on the moonwalk where they wandered around to the rear of the vehicle. Had they put down slightly earlier then it could have ended badly. The boulder field encountered by Apollo 11 was a bit of a surprise, partly due to Aldrin inadvertently overloading the guidance computer that stretched their landing. I'm not sure that Nasa either knew of or anticipated its existence. There was some knowledge of soil mechanics thanks to the surveyor missions which were equipped with scoops and cameras, not to mention images of the lander pads on the lunar soil. The distribution and depth on a wider scale was still an unknown.
Full automation also has issues, not least of which was a recent US robotic lander where the radio altimeter went off the scale due to crossing a crater. The system judged that the sensor was faulty and locked it out with unfortunate results.
The next manned landers have a difficult choice in landing somewhere safe but bland, or more challenging and interesting.