Images of Apollo Landing Sites Soon Available

eric.brasseur writes "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has entered lunar orbit in perfect shape. From a height of 50 km, it will image the Moon in high resolution. The hardware left by the Apollo missions will be clearly visible. The Soviet automatic probes will also be photographed. Previous best images were made by the Japanese probe Kaguya and showed a white patch where the dust had been blown away by the blast of the LM engine."

Comments

God dammit

[Niris]

Just reading the summery makes me worried about the slew of "Moon landing never happened!" posts that are on the way

Re:God dammit

[Alsee]

One way or the other, we will finally have proof.

Either the photos will come back showing no hardware on the moon and we'll finally have proof it never happened, or they will release photos showing landing hardware on the moon and we'll finally have proof of an on going NASA conspiracy to manufacture a moon landing fraud.

Yes, one way or the other we will finally have proof.

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Re:God dammit

[Paul server guy]

Oh Gawd, where are my mod points when I need them!!!!

Re:God dammit

[ocularDeathRay]

in Soviet Russia, you must be new here

Re:God dammit

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm sure the nutjobs will find some excuse not to believe this too.

The nutjobs will believe the the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images have been done in photoshop.

Re:God dammit

[profplump]

Was it possible to fake a moon mission -- probably. But you're missing the hard part of conspiracies: getting everyone involved to keep quiet for 50 years. Even if you assume that most of the NASA staff an contractors really believed they were launching people, there's still a lot of people involved -- the actual astronauts, the radio relay operators, the guys who sealed no-one into the capsule, the guys who recovered no-one from the capsule, not to mention the staff involved in running the filming location(s). At the very least I'm guessing you'd need 20+ people who *know* the moon landing was faked, and probably 2-3 times as many who could reasonably guess based on things they personally witnessed. How would you keep that many people quiet for so long? I'm also not sure what you gain by not sending people to the moon. You've already built a giant rocket than can lift a space craft to the moon. You've already built and used human-capable space capsule technology. You're actually going to land some relatively large spacecraft on the moon. You're already going to transmit radio from the moon from several days. You're already going to land your space capsule back on Earth. Why not just put people in your space capsule and forgo the faking bit?

Re:God dammit

[Shadowmist]

You also forgot one country that would have a motive to claim fakage of the moon landings... the Soviet Union which was in a desperate race to take back it's space leads. But as I recall, the Russians never once challenged the actuality of the American feat.

Re:God dammit

[Alsee]

This just in: 4 out of 5 Slashdot posters lack reading comprehension skills

Yeah, that's why I come here. The Slashdot community comprehension level is about 20% above that of the general population. ;)

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pics and it still didn't happen

[RoverDaddy]

[sarcasm off] For the record, I believe 100% that the landings were real, but I also believe that nothing short of dragging the conspiracy nuts up to the moon themselves will convince them of the fact. Maybe not even that.

Re:pics and it still didn't happen

[Darkness404]

There are a lot of reasons outside of conspiracy theories why we aren't currently on the moon.

A) Lack of funding, the government doesn't want NASA to relearn stuff. We already "learned" about the moon back when we landed there (remember, this post is assuming the conspiracy theories are incorrect). While other planets we know a lot less about them.

B) No evidence of life. Unlike a lot of investigated planets, we pretty much can tell that there is no liquid water on the moon without having to do much to prove the lack of it.

C) Overcomplicating technology, the machines that took us to the moon were simple, simplicity allows you to work out a bunch of bugs and simplicity allows for more accurate human override.

D) The space shuttle, most of the US flights recently have been on the space shuttle, which, cannot land on the moon safely.

E) Space travel is seen as a risk with no real benefits. In the period before Challenger, space flight was considered routine, Challenger's destruction made people skeptical of why we should be putting people in space. Then space flight was considered routine until the destruction of Columbia. Today, it is considered more routine, but still lacks the "this is totally normal" that airplane flights have.

F) The current economy has made it hard for space tourism to get off the ground. Sure, private companies have come leaps and bounds over what they previously had, but as for getting a private company to carry manned missions to the moon? Not quite yet.

G) Space travel is looked at as needless by the average person. Sure, they would like to travel to space, but they don't think it has any benefit to them so they don't really care about it and similarly don't express concern.

Re:pics and it still didn't happen

[EdIII]

Judging by the anonymous coward posts here on slashdot, I'd say it'd be more in the range of 90-95%.

Not really. Sometimes it just *fun* to say that we never went to the moon. I doubt that many of them are actually serious. My own father would be in a car ride for a few hours with a bunch of guys and spontaneously say, "You know.... I really believe the single bullet theory. It was one man that killed Kennedy". Real Life Trolling.

I remain unconvinced we went to the Moon myself. It could of have been wonderful propaganda for all we know, which considering the Cold War, there was a motivation to throw a lot of bullshit around. Seriously :) Prove that we *didn't* go the moon. Can you? I can't. We can only rely on statements from a government that I KNOW that I don't trust. It's like God you see, I can't disprove that he exists, and you can't prove that he exists.

All kidding around aside, I think it's highly likely we went to the Moon, but we have to at least admit that all of the authoritative statements that *prove* we went to the Moon come from people that continue to lie to us to this very day.

Re:The coverup will continue

[macdaddy357]

Seriously or sarcastically, I knew someone would say something like that. No matter how many experts say these photos are genuine, tinfoil hatters who want to believe they are photoshops still will.

That's cool and all

[Idiot with a gun]

But let's not pretend for a second that it'll stop the theorists. They want to disbelieve, so nothing will prevent them. As was mentioned on the Conspiracy Theories episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit, when someone says "You can't convince me," those aren't the words of a skeptic, merely of a jerk. That being said, they should be some neat photos.

Re:The coverup will continue

[The Master Control P]

The perfection of the self-confirming delusion:

If you agree, obviously I'm correct.
If you disagree, you're part of the conspiracy to suppress my correctness.

Re:Lunar ruins

[causality]

"Just reading the summery makes me worried about the slew of "Moon landing never happened!" posts that are on the way"

As for me, I think we did go to the moon. However I feel that these so called images will be doctored to remove evidence of the alleged "ruins" that are littered across its surface..

I don't think the problem is whether or not we went to the moon. The problem is that we have a government which has no problem lying to us. You really want to shut up the conspiracy theorists? Restore the honor and decency and respect for the citizens that the government of the USA once had. The way I see it, that's what this whole deal is really about.

They'll believe what they want to believe

[Temujin_12]

In my experience, people who are adamant about the moon landing being a conspiracy seem to act that way merely because it gets them attention. They seem to feed off of the conflict. Since claiming these pictures are also a fake will continue to give them attention, this type of people will continue to hold onto their beliefs.

If people want to believe that the moon landing was a hoax, that's their prerogative. But when they become combative towards anyone who thinks otherwise, that's when they've stepped over the line. It's called basic tolerance and respect. The same applies to other subjects which are debated--science/religion, windows/mac/linux, music, sports, etc. You're entitled to your opinion and the defense of it, but you are not entitled (or at least you're credibility is not entitled) to disrespect or belittle people merely for having different opinions or beliefs.

People who feel the need to constantly attack or belittle different opinions/beliefs merely show how insecure they in their own anyways.

Re:It's amazing

[Ecuador]

Why is something so sad modded as funny?

By 2080, nobody alive will have witnessed it

[Anonymous Coward]

BY 2080, nobody alive will have seen first-hand the media coverage of the Apollo landings. Heck, I was born in 1970 and I don't remember them even though they happened when I was alive.

Anyway, there will come a time when nobody will have first hand memories of the event. The only memories will be those gleaned from videos, reading about it, etc. At some point, the fact that it happened will change from a fact into just something people have read about or heard about.

Eventually many of the people alive will doubt it ever happened at all because the story of the moon landings will have become indistinguishable from a fable.

Think about the war of 1812, or Columbus "discovering" America. We have a pretty good idea these things happened. But all we know about them is stuff we have read or heard. We have also heard many works of fiction from those same times. At some level, it's all similar.

This ignores the concept of revisiting the moon, which may or may not ever happen. I have my doubts about NASA on this. But if we ever do go back and build a city, then those people will doubt it was ever such a big deal.

Interesting observaton.

[Paul server guy]

What I find interesting is that most of the comments are about the "hoax" hoax, a few about how long it took, and not many about how very cool this tech is? Are we really that jaded?

I for one think it's very cool. And I am looking forward to seeing the hardware.

I'm also looking forward to using the date to help plan our mission.