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SMART-1 to Image Apollo Landing Sites
An anonymous reader writes "Space.com is reporting that the European Space Agency's SMART-1 probe is imaging the Apollo landing sites on the moon. The resolution may be good enough to see mineral evidence of the blasts created by landing craft. Photos expected too. The article says it "might put to rest conspiratorial thoughts that U.S. astronauts didn't go the distance and scuff up the lunar landscape." I wouldn't bet my Buzz Aldrin doll that hoax buffs will cease and desist."
It is unlikely, IMHO, that these new pictures will satisfy any of those who do not believe that NASA landed men on the moon. It is much easier to doctor photos these days than to create the conspiracy they believe occurred in the 60's and 70's with the moon landings. In fact, I believe that you could take most of these folks, land them on the moon itself, and they would still claim that they were not actually on the moon, but had fallen victim to some form of mind control. Does anyone know if a tin foil hat will fit inside of a NASA space helmet?
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
...is if these craft could get shots of the hardware we left behind; the moon rovers, the Apollo capsule bases, even the flag.
Don't know if the resolution will be THAT good; but one thing I'd always hoped for in a return to the moon was a look at our old landing sites. I don't know enough about the lunar environment to know, but I wonder if our stuff is still uncovered? Any problems with lunar dust covering things, one wonders?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Buzz already knows how to shut up conspiracy theorists. I prefer his method, too.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Who could actually believe that SMART-1 is really circling the Moon? How could it manage that, without smashing into the giant crystal sphere that holds it up? They try to blind us with all this "Ion Engine" technobabble while everybody knows that all you need is a really long ladder to reach the Apollo 11 landing site and see with your own eyes the flag, the lander an all that stuff.
Some people misdirect their skepticism...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
The site http://www.clavius.org/ really belongs in the body of the post. It answers in depth every "reason" why it's impossible to have landed on the Moon.
If you have your doubts, or otherwise find yourself giving credence to the Apollo hoax theories, you owe it to yourself to visit that site. There's nothing wrong with questioning government and understanding that it's possible (possible != probable, and as hard as it was to land on the Moon, imagine how much harder it would be to fake it in an open society where not only would you have to trick hundreds of thousands of engineers and support personnel as well as thousands of scientists, but also the astronauts who are still alive today and have not contradicted the stories, all the while you can't have made a single mistake that would expose the conspiracy!) that the Moon landings were faked, but this is a case where the evidence is fully on the side of the conventional story.
Living in Houston, I occasionally run into folks who have some connection with JSC and the Apollo program. Two good examples.
As an undergrad at Rice Univ, I took a space physics class for non-space physics majors taught by the chair of the space physics dept. The prof. happpened to have designed a bunch of the experiment packages that went to the moon during Apollo. He was pretty definite that the Apollo astronauts really had gone to the moon and played with his experiments.
More recently, I had the very humbling experience of talking to a NASA engineer who had been in the control room when the Apollo 1 crew perished. Even today, the memory of that day brought tears to his eyes.
...electricity, vulcanism and effects perhaps best classified as "other stuff" (-:.
It's a very tinfoil-hat site, but nevertheless some of the reports and studies they cite are quite real.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I couldn't agree more. I could think of a reason why every argument on that website is not correct... a good website to take a look at is http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html It doesn't specifically debunk the questions on the Clauvius website, it still debunks a lot of the general misconceptions on the site. Other arguments on the site can be de-bunked by thinking about simple scientific facts such as the lighting on the moon (reflected lighting from the surface of the moon) and perspective... these conspiracy theorists just need to learn about some really simple scientific facts.
Something naked-eye visible would have to be pretty big. I've heard of at least one lunar observatory that has an open invitation to conspiracy theorists, though. They're welcome to come up and see a full demonstration of the lasers hitting the targets, a tour of the facilities to see how they work, and a live demonstration, apparantly all for free. That's a pretty big meatball to leave out on the chopping block, too, I doubt those demonstrations are cheap for them, since they don't usually do them every day. A truely dedicated group that just wanted to be assholes could probably bankrupt them just sending people up for demonstrations.
Nobody's ever taken up the offer, but there's a pretty obvious counter to it, which I think has already been used about the laser reflectors: They could just as easily have put it up there with an unmanned mission. Many conspiracy theorists don't dispute that unmanned missions take place, only that the manned Apollo missions did.