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Are There Images of the Lunar Landers from Orbit?
banditski asks: "We have pictures of Mars rovers from taken from orbit, like this photo of Opportunity, but I could not find any of the lunar landers from 60's and 70's? If they do exist, where are they?" More interesting photos from the MRO can be found in an October entry of the Bad Astronomer weblog, and interestingly enough this sentiment was repeated by a couple of posters, there. It won't be until 2008 until we get a fresh pair of 'eyes' on the Moon, but that doesn't mean that there aren't earlier, and just as interesting images buried somewhere on the net. Where can you find interesting orbital photos of the Moon, particularly ones that contain the LEMs, or other photogenic aspects of Tranquility Base?
We never landed on the Moon
Geez, I thought everyone knew that.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
A discussion of the difficulty of imaging the landers and a picture: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc .htm
Considering how sensitive the global warming issue is on Earth, the UNITED NATIONS had decided to cover up the environmental damage done by space probes to avoid being sued by any extra-planetary lawyers.
In short, no, AFAIK. No LEMs, no Surveyors, no Lunokhods... But you could ask more here.
I believe it is because modern lunar orbiters have focused more on mapping minerals and such rather than on high-resolution imagers like the absolutely huge HiRISE.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html
These are the best photos available: http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_ lander.html#apollo
If the landings were faked in the first place with 1960's technology (and the idea of keeping all those involved completely isolated), what do you think could be done with current technology and digital photos?
(and I am sure there are people out there who would take the above seriously)
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Interesting to find out that Hubble can not do it. It really makes a case for continual improvements of camera (lighter weight and smaller / pixel resolution) for using to send to other planets.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Isn't it convenient that they didn't equip any lunar orbiter since the 1970's with a camera powerful enough to resolve the landers. Maybe they didn't want to look for them, cause they knew they weren't there.
This NASA press release says that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (planned for 2008) will be the first time it's possible to take photos of the landers.
I seem to remember a photo from 1-2 years ago, though. It showed the shadow of the LEM and some nearby stuff (Surveyor?). Not enough resolution to resolve the objects themselves, but the sun was low on the horizon, creating huge shadows.
... hurrying to prevent the news that the moon landing in fact never happened from coming out:
* Quick, launch that space junk towards the moon before LROC comes along !
* Oh, it seems that we couldn't photograph the landing site due to a metric conversion error.
* Giant moon storms have suddenly wiped out all evidence of any landing on the moon, what a coincidence eh ?
* OMG this is not the moon we landed on in 1969, we have been tricked !
* There is life there, but not as we know it - they made our moon landers disappear.
* OK, the moon landing was faked - see this little bunny, this funny little bunny ? Look how cute this little bunny is ! So cute !
* The russians did it !
* The chinese did it !
* The martians did it !
* The democrats did it !
* In a blatant act of time-terrorism, our moon landing was sabotaged and in fact never ever took place !
* Due to global warming, our moon landers have shrunk to microscopic size.
* Because we plan to go to the moon in a decade time again, we decided to clean the place up and remove all evidence of any moon landers. Neat eh ?
* Our moon landing was an advanced project, so advanced that we calculated the environmental damage the moon equipment would have on the moon would be enormous. Therefore we decided, back then in 1969, to make all equipment on the moon from bio-degradable plastics - and look : they have all degraded !
* The chance of a meteor hitting the moon is very large - by a mere coincidence meteors have struck the exact same places our moon equipment were at and removed all evidence of us ever being there.
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The story is so obviously a troll. Just coming out with "there are no landers on the moon" would have been rejected, even by the /. editors. So this is a very slightly disguised way of throwing out the same claim for 'discussion'. It's pretty obvious that all this will generate is comments about faked landings. Kudos to the author who slipped it past the editors!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The truth is, we've sent far more and better spacecraft to Mars in the last few decades than to the Moon. The only things the US has sent to the Moon since 1972 have been Clementine, a DoD low-cost project that didn't have anywhere near a good enough camera, and Lunar Prospector, another low-budget item that had no camera at all. Galileo swung by briefly, but not enough to take close-range pictures. Europe has sent SMART-1, again decidedly low-budget: it took over a year to get there and was mainly for testing other things besides photography.
But that's the Moon for you - the inner city of the solar system that everybody says they care about but nobody does anything.
Energy: time to change the picture.
The Whalers on the moon?
"We're whalers on the moon, We carry a harpoon. But there ain't no whales So we tell tall tales And sing our whaling tune."
we always see the same side of the moon. the landers landed on a lighted part of the moon that is just on the far side that is visible from earth.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
oops... im wrong... there are 6 lander sites on the visible side of the moon.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
You are referring to the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment, of course. It could be said that the LLRE returns a single-pixel image of a manmade object on the lunar surface.
We are inundated by images nowadays...
It doesn't matter how remote something is, and what happened there, we want a full panavision image of it pronto from CNN or with beach babe added from FOX.
No, seriously, with all the bogus information we get from our respective governments it isn't at all surprising that the disenfranchised might suspect everything under the Sun (or Moon). Maybe they (the US) should send a High Yield full spec package to take snaps of previous holidays spent on the moon for the kids back home.
They'd probably be the coolest and number one wallpapers for quite a while !!
Humm, maybe Microsoft should.....Apple MacOS ? I-MoonLandingWallpaper ?
Please don't sue moi !
End of Line.
Telescopes are not an option: http://calgary.rasc.ca/moonscope.htm
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No lunar recon probes have had the camera resolution to do it as far as I know. The closest was SMART-1 which was plowed into the moon.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEM1O6BUQPE_0
I find it odd that some posters here are assuming this question to be a troll... as if the questioner must be demanding photographic "proof" that the landings occurred in the first place!
Fer chrissakes, is there no place for plain old curiosity anymore?
I watched the landings on live TV. And though one could say I was gullible, being just shy of six years old in July of '69, I never doubted the authenticity of the landings.
Be that as it may, I'd still LOVE to see some photos of the discarded equipment from orbit. Why? Cuz it would be f#$%ing COOL!!
I clicked on this story/headline BECAUSE I want to see some photos of the old landing sites. And thankfully, some other posters have provided links. And because of that, now I know that in fact there aren't very many such photos in existence, and why.
Sheesh! Give the guy a break, he's just asking an honest, curious question...
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Surely any geek worth his salt would have found the relevant information inside of 5 minutes. I know I did, and I wasn't even the first to post the relevant link. One poster has suggested it's merely 'moon landings were faked' flamebait, but really, that's been a. so thoroughly debunked I'd sign up anyone who still believes that for the most remote lunatic asylum I can find, and b. discussed to death on /. Can we move on now?
In comparison to the area of the laser beam on the moon's surface, the retroreflector is tiny, so the overall effect of the reflector should be small as well. Actually, the effect of the reflector is so incredibly small, that "Even under good atmospheric viewing conditions, only one photon is received every few seconds." according to this NASA bulletin. It also mentions that the beam diameter is 4 miles, approximately 130 million m^2, while the reflector is less than 1/4 m^2. The reflectivity of the retroreflector is not 500 million times better than that of the lunar surface (with an albedo of 0.12, ther can even theoretically only be an improvement by about a factor of 8), however, it quite likely is retroreflective in a much tighter angle.
What I'm saying is that receiving one photon every few seconds won't impress any of the "moon landing critics".
That's no moon!
Albedo is not the same thing as retroreflectivity. Albedo is the ratio of reflected to incident electromagnetic radiation, so it can't be greater than 1.
Retroreflectivity, however, is another matter completely. It's not a ratio, but just a measure of brightness (more or less), so there's no maximum. White clothing, for example, has a retroreflectivity of about one-third. The moon is only modestly better than this, at about one-half, iirc from high school. Most road signs have a retroreflectivity measured in the hundreds. I don't know what the retroreflectivity of the mirror they put on the moon, but I imagine it's no less than what traffic signs are.
Shining a laser at the moon and getting an additional photon back every few seconds is far in excess of getting an additional photon back every hour or two, which is what it would be if the moon's surface alone were responsible for the reflection.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Photos provided by NASA or any other agency would do absolutely no good. The nutters who say the lunar landing was faked will just claim that the photos of the site were faked as well.
It stands to reason that if NASA would fake the landing, the could also fake the photos and fake the science to take them. This is not the case.
If you think the lunar landing were faked take some real physics courses and then decide for yourself. Otherwise go back to working on the perpetual motion machine behind the trailer.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Apollo 12 was able to land in very close proximity to a Surveyor probe because its location could be determined from images originating from Lunar Orbiter probes. I believe its shadowed image was also discernable in the LO pics. Other LO images showed long shadows from boulders that had rolled down crater walls. So, yeah, it is possible to see them unmanned landers, and it has been done.
In 100 years, after all the Earthlings kill themselves off and China colonizes Mars, there won't be a single living being who still believes the moon landings ever happened. The doubts would just grow in number. The media, empowered by Digg brain implants that disable independant thought, would declare the moon landings a hoax.
There would be no way to prove otherwise, not only because humans would be incapable of independant thought outside Digg, but because China would have destroyed the moon in retaliation for Condoleeza questioning human rights violations.
They'll have to use boardwalks after all. The tubes are set aside for the internet.