Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Crater Moved
mytrip writes "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location. 'In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe. The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north. The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the US imagery. Lakdawalla determined that the crater in question wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south.'"
It's a space station.
They moved it to cover up the obelisk!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In Soviet China, Crater Moves You!
... who on earth would do such a thing?
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
SPOILER: It was a poor stitch/blend job.
This guy's the limit!
probably a feng shui thing.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
They should have used the original movie set in New Mexico.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Haven't cartographers been known to put little errors like this in on purpose so they can tell if someone has copied their map? Still seems pretty silly to do it with such scientific data, but we know that China has no qualms manipulating any other kind of information.
You know those crazy craters, getting legs and all. Happens all the time.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Bad Astonomy readers are already up to date. It's an error in composition of the picture. Nothing less, nothing more.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The main difference between Chinese and American moon missions: 30 minutes after the Chinese have explored the moon, they feel like exploring it again.
Proverbs 21:19
We had an agreement that they would not build anything in that crater, and yet it was lighted up like a christmas tree. It should have been a clean pass for the cameras dammit.
I'm convinced they have a base on the moon.
Maybe they just feel neglected because their cool achievements aren't as fanatically received as they had hoped. :(
the chinese need to alter absolutely everything to conform to some ideological thingamjig, what this would be conforming to isn't real clear
so it's probably just a case of them doing it 'out of habit'
or maybe they were hiding Iran's nukes from our glorious leader's intelligence services
The US version looks way more realistic.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I for one welcome our Moon based crator moving overlords.
a copyright trap?
FairTax baby!
Couldn't the additional small crater seen in the Chinese photo be from an asteroid collision that occurred after the Clementine picture was taken?
It seems here that this is actually just a result of a vanilla screw-up.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Though instead of "stupidity" I'd substitute "error".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
http://xkcd.com/331/
But not in the convetional sense... China actually went up there AND MOVED THE MOON.
I for one welcome our new moon-altering overlords.
SQL programmer goes to a bar. Walks up to two tables and says 'Excuse me, may I join you?'.
Chuck Norris round-house kicked someones ass into the moon after the previous pictures were taken and created a new crater.
We have the ability to create beautiful 3D renditions of humain beings in real time (video games). Why are some of you utterly convinced that this is a legit photo because the lighting is a little bit different in this photo than the almost identical one released before it?
Pour some Chinese slave laborers on this problem and I'll bet that you would have finished product in about a week.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
As per the TFA, a mistake was made stitching together 19 separate photographs to produce image of a large area of the moon that the probe could not have captured in one shot. Since each picture is taken at slightly different angle and distance from the surface, some retouching is unavoidable. Otherwise some craters will look like a weird set of arcs with different radius rather than circles. Such stretching got to slightly move some depicted object from their exact position. In fact, it is not possible to produce a flat picture of a 3D object without distortions. Just compare the size and shape of Alaska on your globe as compared to your map.
I would assume that you can request the original mission data for serious research use instead of having to rely on newspaper clippings for science. If those images are also doctored, then we have a genuine controversy.
I bet the Chinese program is just buying new pix made by NASA to present as their own, so NASA can ask for bigger budgets to compete. Someone at NASA is trying to keep China down by photoshopping the crater - in their Capricorn One Lunar Simulator.
But the question remains - who inserted the ' into the Chinese probe's English propaganda name? NASA doesn't have that tech in its budget - must be Russia or Japan.
This new space race is getting really interesting! For Korea's special effects houses, anyway.
--
make install -not war
The original article says and suggests nothing about the photo being "doctored", it's simply a mistake that scientists make all the time. When can we expect a better moderated Slashdot or people who can read?
The summary almost criminally neglects to include the reported reason for doing this, which is entirely legitimate:
Often, surface features that show up on two strips of data have to be manually corrected to produce the finished image, due to subtle changes in perspective.
"You know that there should have been seams in that image, and I just did not look for them carefully at the time," Lakdawalla told me today.
If you've ever viewed satellite imagery, you'll recognize that the source images are not nice, ultrahigh resolution wide arc views, but instead low resolution wide arc views or high resolution narrow arc views. The 'recognizable' product that is released to a nontechnical public, such as the images used in Google Earth, are the result of post-processing including image registration, tone correction, etc. See this article on mosaicing multi-sensor images, for example.
Surprise. Some technician made a mistake. No cookie.
Must be some sort of Falun Gong coverup.
I realize that it goes against the general Slashdot commenting procedure, but read just a little before commenting on this one, please.
1. Two photos were poorly stitched together, repeating an image of a crater on the combined photo (the crater was photographed twice).
2. Chinese scientists miss the poor stitch job and proclaim they found a new crater.
3. Someone else takes a close look at this "discovery" and points out the error in the stitch job.
The crater wasn't intentionally added, it's a result of trying to align two photos, each taken from a different perspective in which the edges won't completely line up exactly.
http://xkcd.com/331/
..and what happens if they actually do find anything new? hello! Boy who cried wolf syndrome....
pffffft. that was the sound of their credability dying a death.
its sad really, somewhere in China there are some *very* capable engineers holding their heads in their hands.
The parent comment is inane. I can tell from some of the words and having seen a few inane comments on /.
That supports the article; it doesn't nullify it. In fact, Bad Astronomy gave them credit for figuring it out. (The summary could have explained this a little better, but what's new?)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...but the URL is a MS blog, and I banned myself from these years ago.
Open the image and Photoshop. Use the rubber stamp tool to remove some 'imaginary' seams. It is pretty easy to replicate the mistake and easy to understand how it could be made. The Chinese scientists should have verified their findings with the original un-stitched images before taking it to the press.
Could it be that the crater has been formed recently? Do things still hit the moon? Or has it been left untouched for a long time?
Fortunately it's too far for them to camp, and they havent figured out that there is no loot on the moon(save for the US mission).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Just add a tariff to make up for the intentional depreciation.
I for one salute our Lunar Overlords and their quick-thinking relocation of their Lunar Attack Base when they saw the Chinese coming!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
is all the mercury and lead on the original photo. Lick it and die.
That's no Moon!
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
could it be they saw the american lunar landers, and to be more patriotic, moved a crater a little to hide it?
did any of the apollo missions land near craters?
something
the Chinese photoshopped-out the secret alien moonbase where all the UFO's come from.
Everyone knows NASA have been sucessfully editing out alien content from all their space imagery since the 60's.
Th CIA were afriad that the Chinese would finally blow the game by releasing unedited images of aliens on the moon to the public.
It was only when Bush threatened trade sanctions on the import of fortune cookies that the Chinese agreed to also edit all imagery.
with all the high powered telescopes, land and spaced based, why cant we point them at the moon and find the rover, flag, space boot prints, etc that was left over from the landing? its not like the moon has shifting sands or such (or does it? ;)
Anyone who's bought a "copywatch" or other knock-off product in China knows that sometimes the details are a bit different. What makes you think their version of the Moon would be identical, too?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It seems that when a shameful act or incident is exposed in China a high ranking official has to commit hari cari. I wonder if the mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, is going to have to chop his guts out. Yuck!
..the moon must be populated by little green men waving 'Free Tibet' placards..
As over the top as it sounds, I wonder if China will end up jailing (or even executing ) the worker that "doctored" (more likely misstitched) the strips. If this causes China enough national embarassment, that is.
The rogue crater has been recalled, and it didn't even contain lead!
Someone call Richard C. Hoagland!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Which is why China is a mature fascist country as opposed to a communist country.
see http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001682
Snippet:
China is not, as is invariably said, in transition from communism to a freer and more democratic state. It is, instead, something we have never seen before: a maturing fascist regime. This new phenomenon is hard to recognize, both because Chinese leaders continue to call themselves communists, and also because the fascist states of the first half of the 20th century were young, governed by charismatic and revolutionary leaders, and destroyed in World War II. China is anything but young, and it is governed by a third or fourth generation of leaders who are anything but charismatic.
The current and past generations of Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, may have scrapped the communist economic system, but they have not embraced capitalism. To be sure, the state no longer owns "the means of production." There is now private property, and, early last June, businessmen were formally admitted to the Communist Party. Profit is no longer taboo; it is actively encouraged at all levels of Chinese society, in public and private sectors. And the state is fully engaged in business enterprise, from the vast corporations owned wholly or in part by the armed forces, to others with top management and large shareholders simultaneously holding government jobs.
This is neither socialism nor capitalism; it is the infamous "third way" of the corporate state, first institutionalized in the 1920s by the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, then copied by other fascists in Europe.
I bet that some Tibetian monk is going to get beaten for this little screwup.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
After years of spamming the universe with our radio and TV, it turns out someone was listening. The moon showed it had the self confidence of a teenage-girl-with-acne as it filtered out a beacon of hope from the low-frequency radiation. The countless late night ads for The Proactiv Solution! The moon joins the ranks of Jessica Simpson and Vanessa Williams and millions of others who have overcome their battle with acne. Congratulations moon!
Let's say you take a editorial by David Brooks and paste it in without attribution.
It's called post-processing. You should go to the STSCI site and download some raw Hubble frames if you want to see some sources images that were "doctored" in the extreme to create those iconic images that adorn your calendars and desktops. The unprocessed frames are barely recognizable and contain huge amounts of visible noise from cosmic ray hits and all sorts of instrument artifacts.
The Chinese screwed up mosaicking their imagery. Big deal. Now that they know how far up their ass the scientific community will be looking, I am sure they will strive for more rigor. Their desire to be a contributing member of the scientific community appears genuine to me.
Edith Keeler Must Die
They moved the crater because the Falun Gong led exercises at the original location.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yepp. Making fun of the crackpots. I ain't one, but I can tell you this:
... I don't know. I've only heard of various people mentioning the same thing: Artificial structures on the moon. Maybe it's now part of an ongoing NASA meme - who knows.
Back in 1971 my mother protocolled Apollo radio transmitions - she was one of the few office workers with the witts and education to actually understand what the astronauts actually were talking about. She clearly remembers astronauts of one of the later missions describing buildings and artificial structures on the back side of the moon.
Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
I've got 3 explainations for this:
1.) My mothers brain is starting to go haywire and she's mixing up memories with science fiction movies and crappot theories she picked up somewhere. This is the most unlikely. She told me about this the first time when she was about 45 and I was an older teenager. And given that she still helps students through highschool and college with accelerated math at the age of 67 I would excactly call her senile. We don't talk that much but she is still one of the most resonable and intelligent people I know and way more intelligent than the rest of my family - my father included (She actually helped him with projects as homework - the guys at work thought he was the genius).
2.) The NASA guys (my father was an electronics engineer with NASA but at a different department) had some budget overhang and had some people came up with a little joke. NASA is known as one of the best places for practical humor. Engineers and personel constantly vent by pulling hilarious stunts cross-funded with little bits of US tax money. Like the famous sign on the Space Shuttle transporter "Place Orbiter here - black side down.". I can tell you, that is sooo NASA typical.
This scenario is actually more likely - however I've never heard of anyone cracking the punchline on this. And faking transmition recordings and involving parts of a department for something that is only funny for a short period of time
3.) What my mother heard on Apollo radio transmition recordings actually happend. Wether the astronaunts were stoned, had mistaken something natural for something artificial even though they had the optics to verfiy it or it's the pure and simple truth I can't tell. However I'm inclined not to be to suprised if it turns out that the recent japanese video of lunar orbit stops at a very awkward time (when a very straight line on the surface draws nearer from the lunar horizon) or the claimed editings of chinese lunar surface pictures were edited for that exact reason.
This is only heresay and I'm posting anonymous for a reason - so don't be fooled to think this is a 100% verified fact. But - and that's what I'm getting at - you shouldn't entirely rule it out as an option. Entire belief systems would have to be revised - I sure think it's possible that quite a few people higher up have no interest in making a big news of this.
My 2 cents.
Who ever tagged this story "claters" deserves a mod point... only if I could.
I'm still chuckling about that.
...That's because they didn't use the same original sound stage as NASA's faking of the moon, but soom cheap Chinese Z-movie knock-off. With Philipino actors.
...Yeah, but moving the crater a little bit further south made whole moon a lot more Feng Shui. Letting the Qi flow freely.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's not the moon, that's Niel Goldman's face!
*humble apologies*
There are much more interesting photos to be found in the link to a Chinese news article below. There are 3-D lunar images to found on pages 2 and 3 of this report. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-12/03/content_6294146.htm
1. I, for one, welcome our new lunar mobile-crater overlords.
2. Yes, but did it move on linux?
3. So Ballmer's throwing chairs all the way to the moon, now, is he - maybe that caused the new crater.
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Though instead of "stupidity"
:)
> I'd substitute "error".
Sure way to be caught completely off guard by the eventual malice
I live by
"When widespread madness is the only official excuse, try looking for a better theory".
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
There have been known to be structures on the moon. Some craters are actually mined. The US has known since the early days of mapping. The back side (side that never faces us) has structures miles large.
Watch this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6QNzH4x1rY
http://xkcd.com/202/
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
that the US space missions were faked, they put the craters in the wrong places.
It's quite obvious the American's doctored the original and the Chinese one is the accurate one.
Sam "to lazy to register" Look
that weren't put there by people.
That you tube video as been debunked.
However, lets look as some simple issues.
if NASA had evidence of structures, NASA would have been give all the money they could possible want. We would have a sustained presence on the moon and probably Mars and would have been used politically in the cold war.
There is no reason not to release the information.
Jeezs, how many senators would get more votes because the Companies in there state would get military contracts?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Cost of an education? More than you can afford, it seems.
Speaking of photographs of craters, this is a neat one.
Development of the Mars global surveyor: $148 million
Launching it into space: $52.6 million
Getting it into orbit: $46.4 million
Seeing what the martins really think of us: Priceless.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
I think you got it wrong. In Soviet China, this flies over heads.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You see a lot of people complaining about editorial quality or whatever but usually I could care less. Lately it's been getting worse and worse with the summaries and I've been thinking about "slashdot" alternatives or what not. In reality though I've been to lazy to bother.
This article goes way over the line though. The misquoted/poorly worded summary is completely slanderous implying that the image is fake when the article it links to shows the exact opposite is true. In addition this isn't even one of the political free speech topics which are usually the target of such poor summaries. When even the science articles are getting this treatment I draw the line.
I doubt such a post will change anything but I figured it was worth it to raise the ire of other users if possible while I leave for greener pastures.
[ WARNING: Rant (You've been warned!) ]
/. readers & contributors prefer to claim themselves to be?
./ to whom this comment applies and, for them, popularity among the brainless masses is probably more important than the fact that anyone with an adequately-functioning brain would not argue the validity of this post. At any rate, have a nice day and thanks for reading this message.
The tragic truth does not concern Chinese Culture, American Culture (which is fast beginning to resemble something found in a Petrie Dish at your local laboratory) or any other culture. It concerns ethnocentric, irresponsible children passing themselves off as intelligent, Internet-savvy human beings. Isn't this what
It would be a much happier and tolerable world if those of you who resemble this remark (Unfortunately, you are probably not bright enough to know who you are...) would try applying a little more wisdom to your weak attempts at humor. First of all, humor is not something that comes at the expense of others. That would be something else. Sure, it has been called 'black humor', but there's a reason the 'black' was added. When was the last time you sat next to a person of another race and told an ethnic joke that was disrespectful to them? If you wouldn't do it in real life, don't do it here. I'm sure the majority aren't interested in your cowardice, microscopic testicles or poor sense of humor. You're not doing the world any favors by promoting negativity. Not to mention, if you had the pan-cultural knowledge that would be of much more benefit to you than your ethnocentricity, you would realize how foolish and ignorant your attempts at humor actually are.
The Chinese would probably be planning missions to Mars now if not for pathetic nationalism, which does little more than racism, ethnocentrism or other obstacle-building, disturbing habits of the global community. In fact, if we worked together and tried a little harder not to disrespect each other, to share technology or to even work together a bit more efficiently, we might all be living on another habitable planet/platform researching new resources instead of killing each other over the ones we fight over now. Do the world a favor and try to be more productive. There are enough issues we can do little about that make change difficult already. Let's not add to them. Let's try to get past the ones about which we can do something.
Feel free to rant all you like about my post, I'm sure I am outnumbered by the majority of people on
And they probably used a pirated copy of Photoshop as well!
Its a picture of arbitrary impact sites on a rock, distinguished from a universe of rocks only by the fact that this rock happens to be bigger than most of the rocks in convenient proximity to the only wet rock we've found yet. What is the scientific significance here?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
My China-made shirt has a similar problem: it has 2 neck holes and one sleeve.
Table-ized A.I.
If I understand well, the Chinese did take real hi-res pics of the Moon but when they tried to combine them prior release they suck it up and a crater was duplicated in error.
For programmers, this is similar to combining two subroutines by copying and pasting the code but then forgetting or failing to properly merge the code of the two parts. Let's say you have, for example:
Now the above at this state is the same as having two moon photos with a crater (number 3) being one time in the first photo, and a second time in the second photo. Essentially two photos that feature a small region in common. This happens all the time in space imagery.
Then you look at the code and you realise it's silly and carries a performance penalty, so you want to fix it. Seeing that the merge is easy, you give out this task to a junior programmer. But the junior is sloppy and drunk and when they copy-paste they produce this little beast:
Now at this point the above is equivalent to having two moon photos badly merged with the same crater being visible twice in the same photo.
During the code review you find that stupidity and you fix it, while yelling at the junior before firing them:
The above is like a properly processed moon photo with no duplicate craters.
(and the junior then sues for wrongful dismissal, oh my)
For me, the fact that the Chinese comminists built a spaceship and then failed to properly merge two photos shows that technology can be easily imitated across nations and the only thing that can keep a nation competitive is the knowledge and skills its people have in their brains. The Chinese successfully copied US and Russian technology, but then failed miserably when they needed to do some work involving knowledge and skills.
A nation investing solely in technology, as the current US administration does, will surely fail and get eaten by other countries that invest more. It can only take a huge hurricane or a superstrong earthquake in the wrong place to damage vital US economy centres and thus to slow down the US economy, allowing competitors to take the number 1 position internationally. Technology is easily copied (for example, the Russian spaceshuttle is a perfect clone of the US one, just look at it, this without saying that Russian engineers aren't good, they do know their stuff, but their until recently communist administration, which is still quite anti-democratic, seemed more inclined to copy rather than research).
What a smart nation must do is to invest in its people... or more specifically in their brains. A nation composed of knowledgeable skilled people will never fail, even if its economy is damaged by hurricanes. Knowledge and skills cannot be imitated by competing nations. While technology can just be copied or surpassed by paying higher grants, basic science and skills take decades to be developed and therefore cannot be copied. The Chinese copied Soyuz (which is also a copy of US crafts) very easily, but they did sloppy scientific work while merging moon photos. Interestingly, TFA says that the first Soviet moon photos also had scientific errors. This means that nations spending
Tell him we've located the Tetrahydral Structure.
You can even see its shadow.
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/ls_17_5aa.html
Better yet, go to the root page, and explore the sites of each of the lunar missions. You can "tunnel" down to photos only a few hundred meters wide.
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html
This is so the chinese government can discern their high resolution pics of the moon from all the other people who have them.
which is sort of like.... ugh, I cant think of another siutation where there would be SO FEW other people that would have that level of rarity. i dunno, somrthing about slashdot readers and pretty girls, or leaving the basement.
you get my drift.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
No they didn't. If you RTFA, it was moved (accidentally) during the stitching process. Useess for scientific purposes, but not intentionally faked.
America, Home of the Brave.
That there is NO MOON AT ALL. It was created by the CIA at the start of the cold war by doctoring all the photos, artwork and literature in all the books and museums of the world. Anyone who declaimed the hoax was locked up as psycho, cuz, obviously, since all the books showed pikchoors, and artwork from centuries past showed the moon, anyone who claimed it was a fake was nuts.
Doing this enabled the US to focus resources on missle development and the plan to economically destroy the USSR. That thing you see in the sky is just a big holographic movie - have you noticed that it loops on a 28-day cycle?
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
You probably meant FARside.
China has it's own moon?
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
She said the Chinese must have blended together the seams between the strips - misplacing the crater. The picture may be pretty, but it's pretty much useless as a scientific product, Lakdawalla said.
To
And I find these "theories" high larious.
One building I worked in (35) had an annex that was used as a history office to store very old (Apollo-era) records, photos, etc.
I've seen what NASA actually stores, not just what's released. And these conspiracy theories (especially the 'moon landing hoax' theory) are incredibly giggliferous.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
couldnt it be the crater of a recent impact?
the chinese wouldn't have felt the need to cover up the "Ch" branded on the moon by Chairs giant laser. Goku wouldn't have been late, damn American super heroes always giving the rest of us a bad name.
"SPOOOOOoooonnnn!!!!!!"
ZOMG, google maps is faked!
I've heard interviews with people involved in receiving the telemetry from the early mars viking missions. They stated that they worked there in the 70's as well. One person said that one day while observing the image that two people in primitive type space suits walked up to the lander and disappeared behind camera view. There are just way too many people reporting issues like this. Gordon Cooper the astronaut is no exception, you can google his accounts any time.
Like I said in another post, I only write for those entertaining these possibilities. Whether accounts are falsified or real makes of little difference to me. Anything can be. If I actually have the experience myself there would be near zero percent taking my word out there. That's just the way things have been arranged. Certainly one is on their own.
We don't. You do.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
This is not a signature.
It's an optical illusion until you realize that the shadows are forming in the bowls of craters. The sun is coming low from the right, and illuminating the left side of the crater walls.
Meanwhile, the LEM shadow looks long because the sun angle is so low.
This looks shopped.
I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite many shops in my time.
> Over the years, NASA has employed directly and thru contractors at least 100,000 people, probably many more. Kids are hired right out of college, sometimes, to work in mission control for manned and unmanned missions, or to help design/build flight equipment. Honest, we're just folks, like any working in any other industry.
> Working on publicly acknowledged unmanned projects like Viking did not require a security clearance. Secret stuff is done by the DOD, which has its own people (the military), rockets, launch pads, and money.
> For the most part, NASA's telemetry has always been unencrypted, so anyone (including other gov'ts) can point a radio antenna at the right part of the sky and find out what NASA's up to.
> Aliens, artifacts, or other wierdness found out there would be worth kilobucks to ANYONE with credible NASA-related evidence.
For one of these NASA conspiracy theories to be correct and NOT be common knowledge, ALL of the following must happen:
> Somehow, NASA/Gov't or someone manages to clamp a lid on the secret as it happens, with a live, unencrypted telemetry stream.
> NO ONE outside NASA notices the sudden increase in secrecy/security and the simultaneous drop off in NASA's normally wide-open public relations communications. By the way, the NASA channel lets the cameras roll *unattended* thruout most missions. Somehow, the secret doesn't escape thru these vectors, either.
> Over 100,000 people who have no special motivation to secrecy are NEVER TEMPTED to sell the big story to a publication.
> NOT ONE publication gets even a whiff at the time the secret happens. Ever notice how it's always years later when the "theory" is first published?
I'll tell you fer sure: If I had proof of NASA encounters with LGM, I'd sell it for a few kilobucks. Almost any normal person would.
Here's my challenge to ANYONE out there who thinks there's some kinda NASA conspiracy, any kind: COME WORK AT NASA AND FIND THE PROOF.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Well, word has it that NASA started encrypting the signals supposedly due to UFO craft filmed by them making front page news. That's just words though.
Much of the best footage taken has been taken by NASA using cameras that pick up wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum. These craft appear to be at least cloaked to our naked eyes for the most part.
Have a gander here and please tell me your thoughts on them...
http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/QuotesPage.html
I work on simulators used to train astronauts, most recently, the network comm simulator. "starting encryption" with 20+ year old equipment that has no built-in encryption is a very big deal. (Yes, most of it is digital). It's not just a switch to flip - it would cost tens of millions. Consider that technology today and as predicted for the next 20-30 years, most forms of encryption provide time, not secrecy. ./, including this, should be construed as any kind of official statement from NASA or my employer. Facts I express are rumors unless you check them yourself, opinions expressed are just that, and not from NASA or my employer, hell, I may not even agree with'em if I stop and rethink it.
Plus, it would require a change in the simulators that simulate the equipment. We've never even been asked to estimate the cost of such a change, which would happen in the early "what if" part of management's planning.
No, NASA has NOT started encrypting...wait, let me qualify that: NASA has not started encrypting MANNED space flight telemetry. I have no personal knowledge of other areas.
And just for the record, NOTHING I post on
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.