SMART-1 to Image Apollo Landing Sites 36
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."
Conspiracy Buffs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Conspiracy Buffs (Score:1)
What is to stop some artiste from Photoshopping them thar images, eh?
Re:Conspiracy Buffs (Score:2)
Actually, due to radiation, they're big expensive tin-foil hats already I believe. =)
What would REALLY be cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't know if the resolution will be THAT good; but one thing I'd always hoped for in a return to the moon was a look at our old landing sites. I don't know enough about the lunar environment to know, but I wonder if our stuff is still uncovered? Any problems with lunar dust covering things, one wonders?
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said; I doubt anything we've left on the moon is visibly covered with dust. There's a fair chance however that there may be microscopic dust and damage.
That's PRECISELY what I meant (Score:2)
I suppose that I could've pretended, I guess...
Re:That's PRECISELY what I meant (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:1)
Dust can also be raised by... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a very tinfoil-hat site, but nevertheless some of the reports and studies they cite are quite real.
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:2)
Re:What would REALLY be cool... (Score:1)
its a hoax (Score:1, Funny)
Speaking of Buzz... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Speaking of Buzz... (Score:2, Funny)
How naive! (Score:4, Funny)
Some people misdirect their skepticism...
We landed on the Moon. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:2, Interesting)
It would explain a whole lot if it turns out that radiation screwed up the film, or they just plain old forgot it or something. I think we did land there (due to the laser reflectors), but some of the rational for the faked photos seems to make some sense.
So we were there IMO, but someone botched up the film, or they ju
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:4, Insightful)
And what about the film/TV scenes shot on the moon? That were broadcast live to the entire planet? They would have been even harder to fake (1/6 G is hard to simulate), faking them would have involved a lot of planning beforehand (to create the shots in time for the landing and live broadcast).
And botching ALL photos and film for ALL landings would be quite improbable. If Apollo 11 had come back without usable film, NASA would have corrected the problem before the Apollo 12 launch.
Don't listen to the conspiracy theorists. They're morons.
Of course we landed on the moon! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:1)
I dont recall the footage from the movies, but as I remember they were not very high quality, compared to the super fantastic moon landing photo stills.
The comment about conspiricy theorists being morons is unfair on the whole... If someone told you oliver north was trading drugs for guns down south they would say your nuts, your crazy, your a conspiricy theorist.
That is not to say a great deal of them could be crazy... it just gets dangerous to label them all morons off the cuff.
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:2)
Re:We landed on the Moon. (Score:1)
Also, if you bought a camera at kmart, it probably was the same technology that was used in WW2
Anyway - moving on...
Re:NASA missed an opportunity. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, we really did go (Score:3, Interesting)
As an undergrad at Rice Univ, I took a space physics class for non-space physics majors taught by the chair of the space physics dept. The prof. happpened to have designed a bunch of the experiment packages that went to the moon during Apollo. He was pretty definite that the Apollo astronauts really had gone to the moon and played with his experiments.
More recently, I had the very humbling experience of talking to a NASA engineer who had been in the control room when the Apollo 1 crew perished. Even today, the memory of that day brought tears to his eyes.