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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."
Actually, I took a webcam shot of the moon from my back yard.. That should be good enough for the CSI team.
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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.
The conspiracy theorists won't have too much time to try and explain away the photos because of their resolution; according to the article the LRO isn't in it's final orbit yet so "Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution."
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Maybe. But if you look at pictures taken towards all four directions from the landing site it doesn't appear to have landed all that close to the edge of the crater.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Since you brought it up, I thought I'd link to the video on YouTube. One of my all-time favorites!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Actually, no.
The moon is lumpy and thus doesn't have a uniform gravity field. Objects in low orbits are slightly perturbed and don't take very long to hit the surface.
An object high enough to make the Mascons not matter is also high enough that Earth perturbs its orbit, and again, takes a short time (months, usually) to either get pulled completely out of orbit or hit the surface.
There are no stable orbits around the moon.
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.
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.
Try looking from the side next time.
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It's not so much that we are incapable of doing it... it's that a straightforward and practical cost-benefit analysis doesn't really show up any reasons why we ought to continue doing it.... or for that matter, why we ought to have done it in the first place, beyond perhaps just being able to say that we did. Since there's no point in continually throwing good money after bad, we stopped going to the moon.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'