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NASA's LRO Captures High-Res Pics of Apollo Landing Sites
The Bad Astronomer is one of many readers who wrote to tell us about NASA's release of high-res photos showing the Apollo landing sites. The photos were taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and show the traces of earlier visits to the Moon. "The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution."
First fake
I'm sure at least once, somebody in the team asked "Now, you guys do know that this will show the landing sight. We really didn't fake the landing, right?"
Gentoo Sucks
Neat shots. I'm just waiting for someone to 'CSI enhance' this so that we can see Neil's bootprints.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Sheesh. These pics are just a few days old and they've already lost the images of the Apollo 13 landing sight.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Crazy people claim that NASA forged all those moon landing videos and photos (missing stars etc.) They have to refine their theory now it seems (maybe NASA forged these pictures as well)...
Wow, those are some really good pictures of the old sound stage.
Actually, to show the landing sight, I think they'd actually have to land again. To show the landing site, however, simply requires a sufficiently high-resolution camera.
It does always bug me that the people who are so mistrustful that they refuse to accept that US astronauts did in fact land on the moon. One of them even harassed Buzz Aldrin to the point that Buzz (in his late 70s) dropped the guy with one punch to the face. CNN just had a front page article where they stated that around 25% of 18-25 year olds doubted the truth of the landing. That is utterly depressing, showing the current level of science education.
Honestly, I think the best argument is that the Soviets would definitely have called us out on not landing. They would have had the technology to disprove us, and don't tell me that they wouldn't have called us out.
Someday I hope that we as a species will go back.
did somebody draw the shadows in the wrong direction!?
Looking at the Apollo 16 landing site, I bet they had a very real "Oh Shit!" moment just before landing...
Come to think of it, it would probably be harder to produce an Apollo-quality fake moon landing than do it for real given 1960 era technology.
I don't know what the final orbit will be but what I find eerie about lunar orbits is that you should be able to insert something into orbit that is only say 10 miles above the highest peaks, possibly even less, and that would be amazing to watch fly over if one was in the position to be there.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
THOSE ARE FAKES!!111 NASA has secret contract with ILM to render hirez MOON photos! I saw it on teh Intarw3bs!
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Footpaths? _please_. And the shadow is all wrong.
government agency in any civilization, ever.
Everything they do is cool.
This is my sig.
The "Apollo 14," etc. images are not old versions of the new high-res pics, like you might think. Those are the new, "high-res" pictures of the old sites.
I feel guilty saying this, but a) high-res apparently means two different things depending on which (mars/moon) team you work for at NASA, and 2) for heaven's sakes, the actually low-resolution imagery of the landers themselves is just going to make conspiracy theorists go nuts. It looks like the result of about 5 minutes in GrafX2 and a basic knowledge of the gradient tool...
Don't those percentages correlate to the same percent of stout Bush supporters? As in the far religious right?
Flat 6000 year old earth and all....
"As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come â" but we believe not too long into the future â" I'd like to just [say] what I believe history will record â" that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17."
â" Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 Commander. Last man to walk on the moon, December 14, 1972.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Couldn't they have faked up higher resolution images? Everyone knows that they created all the moon landings on a sound stage. I mean, rockets making it all the way to the moon? Get real! I've played with Estes rockets, and they can't can't go anywhere near that high. If my 1 foot tall rocket could go a thousand feet up, you'd need a rocket several miles high to get anywhere close to the moon. And where are you going to find a rubber band large enough to attach the parachute?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I can't see any Whalers in the pics! Maybe the Whalers live on the dark side?
Seriously. Is this a joke? Those pictures are blurred beyond the any recognizability. This is beyond worthless!
Aren't they moon buggie tracks and not foot prints?
Which we apparently don't have. I could take a better picture of the moon with a telescope and a camera.
Come on NASA; we have now come to accept that the good 11 footage has been destroyed forever - don't deprive us of 12 too!
Looks like these truths are not so self-evident after all...
that'll shut-up the conspiracy theorists.
OK, so maybe not. One of the best, and least-quoted reasons to believe that the moon landings were genuine, is the way the dust was kicked up by the astronauts and the lunar rover. It follows a perfect parabola -- something dust in an atmosphere never does. So, NASA might have built a humongous vacuum chamber, big enough to contain a studio... But eventually it becomes simpler to go to the moon for real.
This is by far the worst evidence of actual moon landings yet. If anything this will give the naysayers more reason to think the Gov is continuing to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. Come on, a little dot in a grayscale image? I've done more convincing composites of GW's face on a monkey.
The shadow is on the wrong side of the lunar lander.
To show the landing sight, would require an observer with very powerful optics imaging the site from forty light years away.
That sight of the site would then be able to show the landing.
The best we can hope for is a sight of the landing site as it is now.
40 years after Apollo 11...
Walter Cronkite is dead.
And that's the way it was. :-(
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/07/17/cronkite/
--
BMO
I can never seem to see lunar craters correctly. They always look like domes to me.
Which we apparently don't have. I could take a better picture of the moon with a telescope and a camera.
Better than the recent orbiters that have and will be sent up? No. Good enough to see the landing sites? Also no.
they aren't expecting to budge the conspiracy nuts. One thing people need to understand about a TRUE 24k nut - they are starting from an axiomatic position that there is a conspiracy and $EVENT never happened. Any "evidence" to the contrary - such as high resolution images of the landing sites - only serves to illustrate what lengths the conspirators are willing to go to to continue the conspiracy.
It's like people who don't buy evolution, and view fossils as being there simply "to test our faith." There is no way to convince these people. If they ever get brain scanning down I'll bet they would see that a challenge to a conspiracy nut's fixed ideas would be handled by his/her brain almost exactly the same way most people's brains handle an assertion like "black and white are the same color!"
Leave a vehicle unattended anywhere in the solar system and it is stolen. We should be able to see the rovers if we can see the footprints.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
You just have to see how hopeless the great movie houses are when it comes to replicating the moon environment to know it was no hoax. With all the millions at their disposal just watch as TV churns through Moonshot and Apollo hysteria this week and get not even close to it. Plus the eyewitness testimony of thirty people, scientists among them not to mention the unique moonrock samples with mineral forms you don't get on earth, which I have personally seen under microscope. It seems to be a condition of elements of the American public to disbelieve their own government, even when they acheive one of the greatest accomplishments of our or possibly any generation. The vision, tenacity and bravery of those people in your nation is something best not forgotten or questioned.
So . . . The lost tapes aren't really lost, they are up on the moon waiting to be rewound and copied to a DVD disc.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I can't understand how anyone at the time could look at all six landing on the moon as anything short of amazing as opposed to mundane. It sure says a lot about the differences of the times. I look at the landing sites and think that everyone of those is as important as the first moon landing. I wonder if the attitude towards the moon program would have been then if they'd have known how complacent and cynical people would become.
Back then they had all the promise of what the future would be like. Who knows maybe in another forty years time the world will be they way the thought it would be forty years ago.
How sad that we have wasted so much on petty struggles.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, let's quickly send one out, then !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Should dis b3 a prooof? Everybodi knowz pics can be easily faked than acshual moonlandingz. NASA used Photoshopped, wtf, peoaple, can you see it!!?11?!
the landing was real. A few smudges on a jpg isnt going to change my mind anytime soon. I'll believe when I get to visit the moon (when it isnt full). By then they'll be able to virtual reality/Matrix me into believing I am on the moon(or earth).
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The delay in communication is far to short, to be between the Moon and the Earth........so there is your prove that they were not on the Moon.....simple as that.
Anyone else notice in the Apollo 11 image the shadow from the lander is going in the wrong direction? WTF. It just makes you wonder if their photoshop experts have a freakin brain inside their skulls
is that the landing was faked by a studio on the moon