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

[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

[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.

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.

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.