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.'"
If it isn't an obvious photoshop who's to say that the US didn't manipulate their original so that they would know if someone else was using their pictures instead of making their own. I could see the U.S. doing this to see if a government said they had technology that they did not.
Maybe someone could explain to me the implication in the article that the data is scientifically useless. If it's just a bad stitch job done back here on Earth it would seem they would still have the original data and could reperform the stitch no? Even if they don't all the data between the stitches is still good which I would imagine is probably what the real researchers use anyway.
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.
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