SOMETHING JUST ISN'T RIGHT!
By Fran Ridge



John Keller's credentials include Space Plasma Physics Instrumentation and Lunar Remote Sensing using plasma instrumentation and relevant laboratory measurements of particle surface interactions. Atomic and Molecular Physics of Astrophysical Significance. Keller is the Project Scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission, NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt MD.

All the work on the Blair Cuspids, which The Lunascan Project re-discovered in 1996, evolved primarily around the high-res Lunar Orbiter images (not LRO). So in 2012 we had the coordinates of the Blair Cuspids and were having trouble trying to find the anomalies on any of the NEW images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image strips. But one frame number in particular was found and there didn't seem to be much luck in finding the targets on that long frame. So in May of 2015 I proceeded to contact John Keller and began a series of interesting discussions. He seemed to be a real nice and cooperative guy.

On May 1, 2015, I asked him if there was any chance of getting images of  5.1N 15.5E with more shadows? I told him that the mapping images were almost completely shadow-less for obvious reasons, timing being the main culprit. Surely there were images when this view was more interesting.

The very same day I received this email:

Hi Fran,
I agree based on the lunaserv site (ahttp://webmap.lroc.asu.edu) that the images at that location have sun angles no lower than about 47 degrees (image pair M159847595LC    M159847595RC)  I do not select targets but the LROC team has a mechanism for requesting images which you can do here http://target.lroc.asu.edu/output/lroc/lroc_page.html. 
LROC NAC imaging is somewhat opportunistic so when the conditions are right the image is taken, providing that some other target does not take precedence. Thanks for your interest!

So, on May 3, I emailed him again:

John,
Look's like the shadows are really OK on these images but nowhere near the res of the of the LO in 1966. I assume that the ones on the web are made that way on purpose for downloading. Is there any way we can get a much higher res image on that area?
5.1N 15.5E

The next day, May 4, 2015, I received his speedy reply:

Fran,
The two images I referenced are representative of the highest resolution available from LRO at 0.5 m/pixel.  They were taken during the 50 km mapping orbit.  We briefly did an equatorial dipping orbit that brought us down to as low as 20 km for the purpose of imaging the Apollo landing sites and other areas of interest but I don't think we imaged your target.  Due to limited propellant we have since moved into a low-cost elliptical orbit where over that latitude the spacecraft is roughly 100 km above the surface, so any future imaging there will be lower resolution.  Note that while there are limited areas for which Lunar Orbiter resolution is higher than LRO one should also consider other factors for image quality, such as dynamic range, linearity, etc.
I recommend downloading the PTIF of the images such as can be found on http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.0/M159847595LE

Without dwelling too much on the LRO and images of the Blair Cuspids, and, but I don't think we imaged your target, let me say that, utilizing the tools he had told me about, I was able to not only find the same LRO image of the Cuspids, but THREE MORE. You would think that the head of the LRO project would have known about those. But at least he was talking. The last thing I wanted to do was to tick him off. He was always concise and very helpful and reasonably speedy. The door was open so I dropped my new project on him: RIPTILA.

http://www.astrosurf.com/lunascan/riptila.htm
This was something I really wanted to do, but it would take NASA or SPACE-X to pull it off....and pay for it. I had been warned by several of my colleagues that NASA was not going to like it. They don't want us watching the Moon that close 24/7 I was told. but I got a very surprising email that same day!!!

On 5/12/2015 10:28 AM, francis ridge wrote:
I wish NASA had something like this in the hopper.

and Keller replied:
Indeed.  The DSCOVR mission should be something like that looking back at the Earth.

Al Gore got that one thru and this spacecraft is located way out in space, closer to the Sun and nowhere near the Moon. same type of orbital plan, a Lagrange Point orbit. Mine was MUCH closer and cheaper and could look at the Moon and the Earth at the same time!!!

Then, a year later, along comes our discovery of the anomalies on the back side of the Moon at Paracelsus C. We had been courteous and reasonable and had let him alone for 13 months. The door was now WIDE open.

Remember that Dr. Paul Davies, Arizona State University's consultant who has the team to study all the hundreds of thousands of hi-res image strips from the LRO, had been interviewed for an article on the web about the need to look for extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon. He also had many papers, two in particular: Footprints of alien technology (21 June 2011) and Searching for alien artifacts on the moon  (7 October 2011). Talk about the door being open! Stay with me........

Dr. Mark Carlotto, of Mars Project fame (and also a member as we were of the Society for Planetary & SETI Research) had helped me and The Lunascan Project on the Blair Cuspids and had written a paper a few years ago, had since gone into retirement. Ananda showed him our discovery report on the new find on the lunar Far Side in July and he was overwhelmed. Long story short, he took our data and drafted the analysis for Paracelsus C that July.

But I wanted NASA to see what we had found. I wanted to test the waters, one more time before going to LRO & Dr Paul Davies.

David Williams had helped The Lunascan project in 1996 on the Blair Cuspids. In fact he was the one from the NSSDC (NASA Space & Science Data Center, Greenbelt, MD) who had located the other LO image from the "footprint" (it is called) that showed the Cuspids in an overlap of images from LO-II. I sent him the discovery report for Paracelsus C.

David Williams:
"It certainly is an interesting looking feature.  I would guess that NASA is more focused on two types of areas for future rover exploration. Those would be areas that show signs of possible near-surface water ice, such as the deep craters near the poles, and those that show evidence of deep penetration by impacts, such as the South Pole Aitken Basin, where they would want to study deep crustal and possibly mantle material.  At least that’s my best understanding of the types of things they are concentrating on right now."

I don't know why I did it. I guess it was a bad decision on my part, but I sent the discovery report I had drafted on Paracelsus C that Ananda Serisena and I had discovered in June of 2016, on to NASA's LRO Project Scientist, John Keller, first. I wanted to wait and send the analysis that we (and with a big thanks to our colleague, and Mark Carlotto) had written in July and we couldn't get published. I couldn't do that but the temptation was too great and I sent the next best thing.  I hit the send button, and waited. Always, there had been a response within hours, no more than a day.

After a week passed, without so much as a "thank you, but we have seen that one and we know what it is," NOTHING. Two weeks passed and not a word.

The analysis was finally published in November in the Journal of Space Exploration, after months of a runaround and an attempt to bill us over  $1100. Thank's to the effort of Carlotto it was released for all of us through ResearchGate.

Nov. 11th
Tired of the red tape and months of waiting I pounded out an email to Dr. Paul Davies at ASU.  I told him about all the hassles we had encountered and that all I/we wanted was for somebody who would  appreciate our find to just look at it. I didn't even say what we had found, except to say we had looked at a lot of things over the years and had found a lot of "iffy" objects that got worse as you blew them up. This was different.  In fact, I told him the image all by itself was all it took to get my attention. Ending the 5-paragraph email with a plea for him to just look, I signed off and left contact information.

Three days later (Nov. 14) I received an email from Alexa Graves, a student from ASU:

"Paul Davies is interested in seeing that image that you have, as well as the paper that was published."

1) I had Mark Carlotto send the analysis to Dr. Davies.
2) I then emailed a copy of my discovery report and sent another separate email with the image link.

On December 7, I sent the link to the  analysis video which had been released on YouTube.

This is December 12th.
Not one word has come from LRO's John Keller, nor Alexa Graves, nor ASU's Dr. Paul Davies. Was what we found on the lunar Far Side so silly that it didn't even garner a response of any kind?  I would not hesitate to say that what we found was so interesting that it got the attention and comments of many of my colleagues and managed to get Dr. Mark Carlotto out of retirement! And far from being a conspiracy buff regarding NASA and many of the images taken of the Moon by LO, Apollo and LRO, I am thoroughly baffled and truly disappointed.