Mission to Moho

Today I sent a Mark Twain ship to Moho. I was just testing hardware, and the encounter with Moho was the first to pop up.

Moho is the closest planet to Kerbol (the sun of the planetary system). In previous versions of the game it had a strangely hot atmosphere that caused engines to overheat very easily...but that is no longer the case in version 0.18. Now it is an airless body more like Mercury. It's orbit is rather inclined and eccentric, also like Mercury's.

It takes more delta-v to reach Moho than any other planet from Kerbin...and I again did not do too well with my trajectory. I got the Mark Twain Moho ship to the planet, but I used up all of its fuel trying to match orbits with Moho, and the Twain ended up shooting past the planet before I could get it slowed down enough. Almost, but no cigar.

But the Lewis and Clark pilots, Kurt Kerman and Milski Kerman, scrambled into their landers and separated from the Twain to burn hell-bent-for-leather and managed to slow down into Moho orbit. Captain Adly Kerman remained with the Mark Twain, and will no doubt have a rewarding career studying Kerbol from close orbit and having the spacious 3-kerbal capsule all to himself. I think maybe the Mark Twain ship with two fully-fueled landers may just be too heavy for its own good when it comes to matching velocities with Moho or Eve. Or maybe I just need more skill in executing interplanetary trajectories. I should have done the orbital plane shift maneuver when I left Kerbin, and not when I arrived at Moho (since plane shift maneuvers take less fuel when you are moving slower). And I should have dropped the empty fuel tank sooner. Also, I'm probably carrying more RCS fuel than I need (especially since I haven't had the opportunity to do much rendezvous on these last two missions). Below is the Lewis Moho lander after reaching orbit over Moho.

Kurt Kerman targeted the Lewis Moho lander into a crater inside a crater and landed successfully. The map view shows that landing location.

The landing site was near the terminator, so the lighting was poor. Happily, these landers were equipped with radioisotope thermal generators to provide electricity to the landing lights. The RTG is located near the bottom of the ladder, just to encourage the kerbals not to dilly-dally around there when they should be working.

The kerbal EVA suits also have nice bright lights on the helmets, as we see here:

The rocket packs worked well on Moho, so Kurt hopped up on top the Lewis for a standard shot.

I'm not sure how Milski Kerman got assigned to this mission, since as far as I know he is still in the Eve system hopping his lander around Gilly. But here he (or a clone) is doing an EVA after successfully landing the Clark Moho lander in an area with better lighting. He landed on a slope, but did not tip over.

Here Milski tests out the surface gravity with a standard kerbal jump.

I equipped these landers with some measuring instruments. They said that Moho had a surface gravity of 0.27g, and a surface acceleration of 2.66 or 2.69 meters per second squared. I don't know if the slight differences in readings is because of different landing site elevations, or because of the different tilt angles of the landers on the surface. The pressure meters read zero (a vacuum), and the thermometers didn't seem to work.

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