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NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing Doubters
Rob Miles writes "Yahoo! News has this article about how NASA is paying aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph gathering up materials answering the skeptics of the 1969 Apollo Moon Landing, point by point. It's a shame that even $1 has to be spent to debunk these conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands. And it's unfortunate that the nutters will see this as validation of their ridiculous claims ('if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel.)"
www.badastronomy.com
or for less than $15 the printed version at Amazon, or your favorite bookseller.
Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"
by Philip C. Plait
Paperback: 288 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.76 x 8.62 x 6.44
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471409766; 1 edition (March 1, 2002)
Yeah, or they can give the the naysayers (h04X0rz?) a telescope and they can watch the Chinese building a colony there.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
You don't understand how telescopes work.
Hubble is limited by its diffraction resolution, which is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds; this works out to about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. Groundbased telescopes are even worse.
This means that while magnification may be extensive, one cannot resolve details smaller than 90 meters. Clearly, the LM descent stage and other debris would be significantly smaller.
IIRC, the LM descent stage area is about 10 meters across. To image that with any visual accuity, you would need resolution at the order of two or three meters.
...and rather well, I thought, by the guy who runs BadAstronomy.Com.
Here is a direct link to the article where he does so, where he tears apart the horrible Fox TV special that was on in 2001.
St. Petersburg Times" has more info on the incident, if you must.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Yes. But, playing devil's advocate, that does not prove that PEOPLE put it there. Could have, theroetically, been done by an unmanned robotic lander.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Actually, there are defacto "NASA Was Here" signs on the moon. The astronauts left several special reflectors (I forget the name) that reflect light straight back at the target, regardless of the angle from which the beam (in the form of a laser) originates. These have been used for years to calculate the distance the moon has been receeding from the Earth year to year. Also, there are beacons that ham radio operators have been using for years to bounce signals off of.... Why is it these conspiracy theorists always ignore this tiny point?
-jokerghost
and was told that Hubble's focal length is too long.
from what I understand, hubble is unable to gaze upon objects so close to earth. it was designed to peer deep into space.
imaging satellites are probably too close to earth to get a good photo as well. and it really doesn't make sense to build a satellite just to take pictures of the moon. of course, even if NASA (or whomever) did that, there'd still be people saying it was all a hoax... *sigh*
There was also a recent article in Discovery magazine mentioning this bad-science-blundering. They provided the link to bad astronomy and mentioned some of the other urban-legends-of-science like being able to balance an egg during the equinox. One of the points they presented was how scientists do some experiments with bouncing laser beams off a mirror on the moon which the Apollo astronauts placed there. How's that for not landing on the moon?! Check it out some details here
> Be nice to have it cleared up.
m l
Your wish is granted:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.ht
It is correct that Hubbles resolution on the moon is on the order of 100's of meters. Obviously it can not resolve an American flag. However, the Clementine probe captured some imagesof what appear to be a the launch crater from a lunar module. Of course, this brings the United States Navy into the conspiracy if you choose not to believe it...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
This should clear up any misconceptions you might have regarding the Americans landing on the moon
please read and comment.
According to this website, here's why the huble can't do that. And I quote....
"Earth based telescopes should be able to see the Apollo equipment
A telescope's diffraction limited resolving power depends linearly on the aperture of the telescope. Groundbased telescopes also have to look through the murky and turbulant atmosphere so without corrective techniques that are just now becoming common in large telescopes (called adaptive optics), a telescopes resolution is limited by the atmosphere to about 0.5-1.0 arcseconds (3600 arcseconds are in one degree and 360 degrees around the whole sky). That limits groundbased telescopes to a resolution of about 2 kilometers on the moon. From space, a telescope is limited by its diffraction limited resolution. For the Hubble Space Telescope, that is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds or about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. To resolve the LM descent stage which is about 10 meters across, one would need to have a resolution better than 10 meters, perhaps 2-3 meters which means we need a telescope some 30 times larger than the HST in orbit around the Earth to resolve the largest equipment left on the moon."
Please, first, excuse my ignorance, which is huge regarding telemetry and rocket science. Now that we have that out of the way . . .
A movie (based on true events) which came out in 2000 titled The Dish is about the satellite dish that the US requisitioned (not the right word, but you get the idea) to track Apollo 11 while the Eastern Hemisphere faced the moon. In 1969, that dish was one of the few powerful enough to use as a relay for Apollo 11. But apparently the size of Apollo 11 also meant it wasn't easy to track if you didn't have its recent co-ordinates and velocity.
So, my question comes down to whether it would have been so easy to track Apollo 11 if you were the Soviets. (Did they have information about Apollo's progress?)
blog
It was Buzz Aldrin, not Alan Shepard. The Daily Show on Comedy Central showed the footage of it. One of the funniest damn things I've ever seen. The guy has about a head in height, 30 years, and 100 pounds on Aldrin, who's 72. One punch and the guy was out.
No, but twenty seconds of rational thought will debunk any of the conspiracy notions being bandied about by the imbecelic media whores of Fox News.
Sorry, but when conspiracies start to reach "Nowhere Man" levels, they simply don't exist. (If you don't understand the television reference be glad, be very glad. Arguably the worst show to ever air on American TV).
Skepticism is only called for when strong evidence hasn't been presented by those making incredible claims. If NASA hadn't sent back radio signals, video, pictures, brought back lunar material, left "we were here" mirrors lying around, and had their telemetry and every vector tracked by literally thousands of different people, then some skepticism would perhaps be in order. However, they did all that and more
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy