NASA's LRO Captures High-Res Pics of Apollo Landing Sites 197
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."
fake pictures? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fake pictures? (Score:1, Insightful)
The key flaw in their argument is that the USSR would have been tracking each and every apollo mission. if they hadn't been real you can be damned sure that the russians would have been shouting it from the rooftops. The deniers are crazy - a bit like religious fruitcakes!
Re:yes, I know that you are joking (Score:3, Insightful)
It was about 6% of the whole American population, IIRC, in a Gallup poll. About the sort of percentage you'll get as a minimum for any claim, because people tend to agree to statements in surveys to get the surveyors to leave them alone.
Re:The way I *sigh*(t) it... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:yes, I know that you are joking (Score:5, Insightful)
I take it you've never had a conversation with someone who grew up behind the iron curtain, and didn't defect. I once had one such guy physically attack me because I kept shooting down all his theories about how the moon landing was faked. In his eyes, everything in recent history was either done by Russia, was stolen from the Russians, or is a big capitalist lie meant to malign the Russians. You want to talk about ideological blindness, I think Europe has the Yanks beat.
Re:fake pictures? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but who fucking cares? I mean seriously, everytime the Apollo program comes up on Slashdot half of the discussion is about how hoax theorists won't shut up about it. How about we shut up about them, no one else cares about their ridiculous opinions, and if anything it'd be better to ignore such silly ideas.
Same thing for flat Earth theorists, creationists, holocaust deniers, global warming deniers and so on. If we stopped caring about what any looney/troll says we wouldn't even hear of those stupid ideas, cause we're the ones who do the best job at repeating and spreading those ideas.
Lost Tapes Not Lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yes, I know that you are joking (Score:3, Insightful)
What amazes me is that you use the confusion of "it's" and "its" as a sign of actual education. Actual knowledge, instead of (ahem) actual knowledge, like understanding the scientific process, or mathematics, or how to balance a checkbook.
No, the average person gets to spend about a man-year over the 12 years focusing on things like spelling, because... ? The only thing that makes spelling important is that people who know how to spell use that to insult those of us who don't. It's largely an utter waste of time.
I'm a natural-born good speller, I haven't used a spell-check in at least a year, and manage to communicate quite effectively via the written word. Yet I think that spelling is a waste of intellectual energy that we could all well do without.
When you think about it, the confusion is natural. The apostrophe is commonly used to show possession. EG: "That is Bob's shovel.". Yet, as soon as you replace "Bob" with "it" - the apostrophe suddenly disappears. "Don't bother its shovel.". WTF?
But, just to add confusion, "It's" isn't a possessive "his" it is instead an abbreviation of "it is" which are two words and for which the apostrophe adds very little value intellectually. (Ohz noez! - there's a missing "i"!) The only thing saved is a space. w00t! And there's plenty of evidence that even extreme examples of mis-spelling have virtually no impact on our ability to comprehend the material. [pticalillusions.com]
Personally, I'd like to see spelling dropped entirely - let's just learn the vowel and consonant SOUNDS, and let's use the 1 or 2 man-years saved on REAL education like Science, Mathematics, or how to balance your check book.
I wud be haapy tu adopt pyerly fohnetik speling.
Re:yes, I know that you are joking (Score:4, Insightful)
What schools did you go to?? 20+ years ago when I was in school, Intelligent design had no place... in fact, the only religious references I can even remember were the secular Xmas parties and my senior year when we studied Dante for a few weeks.
Science was science. Evolution as a concept was pretty much a fully agreed upon fact even back then. So we want to have an argument whether the first amino acids came together as random chance, or if some higher power had something to do with it. WHO CARES!
-Restil