SMART-1 to Image Apollo Landing Sites

An anonymous reader writes "Space.com is reporting that the European Space Agency's SMART-1 probe is imaging the Apollo landing sites on the moon. The resolution may be good enough to see mineral evidence of the blasts created by landing craft. Photos expected too. The article says it "might put to rest conspiratorial thoughts that U.S. astronauts didn't go the distance and scuff up the lunar landscape." I wouldn't bet my Buzz Aldrin doll that hoax buffs will cease and desist."

Re:What would REALLY be cool...

[wertarbyte]

Any problems with lunar dust covering things, one wonders?

Since the moon lacks any atmosphere, there is no wind up there, so I guess the dust will still be where it was 35 years ago.

We landed on the Moon.

[node 3]

The site http://www.clavius.org/ [clavius.org] really belongs in the body of the post. It answers in depth every "reason" why it's impossible to have landed on the Moon.

If you have your doubts, or otherwise find yourself giving credence to the Apollo hoax theories, you owe it to yourself to visit that site. There's nothing wrong with questioning government and understanding that it's possible (possible != probable, and as hard as it was to land on the Moon, imagine how much harder it would be to fake it in an open society where not only would you have to trick hundreds of thousands of engineers and support personnel as well as thousands of scientists, but also the astronauts who are still alive today and have not contradicted the stories, all the while you can't have made a single mistake that would expose the conspiracy!) that the Moon landings were faked, but this is a case where the evidence is fully on the side of the conventional story.

Re:We landed on the Moon.

[perdu]

And if you are ever in NYC, be sure to visit the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Natural History Museum and see the Full Moon Exhibition [amnh.org] -- glorius photos from the Apollo missions. The finely detailed images from the best large-format cameras ever made were pretty convincing for me!

Re:That's PRECISELY what I meant

[DerekLyons]

I know there's no air on the moon...I just didn't know how much effect impacts on the lunar surface would have, i.e. how much dust it tends to scatter over a period of time.

Look at the ray system of say.... Tycho. Thats an extreme example, but even microscopic impacts are going to raise some miniscule amount of dust. Over time, this adds up. The lunar surface was built by impacts all the way from the big ones that formed a couple of the basins, down to microscopic ones, and they all scatter something.

Dust can also be raised by...

[leonbrooks]

...electricity, vulcanism and effects perhaps best classified as "other stuff" (-: [lunaranomalies.com].

It's a very tinfoil-hat site, but nevertheless some of the reports and studies they cite are quite real.

Of course we landed on the moon!

[NPN_Transistor]

I couldn't agree more. I could think of a reason why every argument on that website is not correct... a good website to take a look at is http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html [badastronomy.com] It doesn't specifically debunk the questions on the Clauvius website, it still debunks a lot of the general misconceptions on the site. Other arguments on the site can be de-bunked by thinking about simple scientific facts such as the lighting on the moon (reflected lighting from the surface of the moon) and perspective... these conspiracy theorists just need to learn about some really simple scientific facts.