It’s probably because I really don’t know nearly enough about the moon and LADEE but what I got from Rick Elphic’s text is ‘our probe was too far from the landing site to be able to detect anything really’. Which isn’t a bad thing, you can’t expect to monitor anything when it’s out of the range of your equipment.
Two questions, though.
This reads like NASA knew the position of the landing site at least roughly in advance. Was that from tracking the probe’s flight and calculating predictions?
The LADEE’s orbit isn’t a secret. Was the landing site (among other reasons like playing it safe, fuel, etc.) maybe chosen deliberately not too close to LADEES observational range?
