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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
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)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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."
Isn't it convenient
Convenient to whom? It's very convenient for the conspiracy theorists as it means they can on thinking that everything is a lie.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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.
Telescopes are not an option: http://calgary.rasc.ca/moonscope.htm
. html
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
.... And footprints. I wanna see footprints.
> It's very convenient for the conspiracy theorists as it means they can on thinking that everything is a lie.
Oh, that's just what they want you to think.
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'
Yep... The moon's seen it's first example of the very human activity known as looting.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.