Images of Apollo Landing Sites Soon Available 263
eric.brasseur writes "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has entered lunar orbit in perfect shape. From a height of 50 km, it will image the Moon in high resolution. The hardware left by the Apollo missions will be clearly visible. The Soviet automatic probes will also be photographed. Previous best images were made by the Japanese probe Kaguya and showed a white patch where the dust had been blown away by the blast of the LM engine."
Lunakhod 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lunakhod 1 carried a French retroreflector array for Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) [iers.org] but unfortunately, contact was lost and no one knows where it is. There are good returns for Lunakhod 2, so I (and others) want Lunakhod 1 back !
Finding this would be a great help for Lunar science (assuming it didn't get crushed in a landslide or something). I know that this is on their list, so good luck !
Re:pics and it still didn't happen (Score:4, Interesting)
How many such people actually exist? With every slashdot article mentioning the moon landings, there is a great uproar about these heretics. I'm sure they exist, but I've never met one, nor do I recall even reading a post from one on slashdot. It makes me wonder why these people (whoever they are) get under people's skin so much.
Re:pics and it still didn't happen (Score:5, Interesting)
More than you might think. I lived for a period of time in a communist country in Asia, and not only did I find there were a number of people who thought that the United States did not land people on the moon, but that those people also typically believed that the Soviet Union had.
Why did they think so? They "learned" it in school :p
Re:pics and it still didn't happen (Score:3, Interesting)
How many such people actually exist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_conspiracy_theories [wikipedia.org]
About 6% of the population, as of 1999. Not bad, compared to the percentages believing in religion, intelligent design, etc.
Honestly, I think about 6% of the population is high or drunk at any given moment, so I'm not sure its a relevant figure.
It makes me wonder why these people (whoever they are) get under people's skin so much.
Well, sometimes its hard to interpret "get under skin" vs "laughing my * off"
Re:The coverup will continue (Score:2, Interesting)
Then join us, maybe you'll get to go...
Re:God dammit (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I believe the moon landings happened. Still, it's fun to consider.
Did anyone ever point a laser at the Apollo landing sites before the Apollo missions allegedly landed? How do you know that wasn't a natural occurrence (some shiny rock) that NASA took advantage of?
Again, as the parent points out, no one is saying NASA was unable to land things on the moon. I'm pretty sure everybody believes, for example, that the Surveyor [nasa.gov] missions weren't faked. So I'd imagine that NASA would be able to land something on the moon that would reflect laser beams back to Earth.
As for the communications, I would assume that the transmissions were sent from the site of the fake moon landing (Area 51) to the Moon and then back. Why? Because that's obviously the first thing that the Russians would check--are these signals coming from the moon?
The tracking? Remember, these guys tracked a capsule that went to the Moon. Again, nobody has any doubts that capsules went to the moon. Were there people on board these capsules? We heard radio transmissions from the capsules, but much like above, there's no reasons the capsules couldn't have sent back voices from the US.
Moon rocks? What was the big thing we learned from the moon rocks? That they had many of the same qualities as Earth rocks! What a coincidence! So NASA got some pretty exotic rocks from Earth and stuck them in orbit for a year or so to soak up all the various cosmic rays that our atmosphere protects us from. One of astronauts from the Gemini missions picked them up during a spacewalk or some such and you have instant moon rocks--rocks from Earth that have been exposed to cosmic rays.
As I have said, I believe that men walked on the moon. But I do think it's a fun question: Could the moon landings have been faked--not were the moon landings faked. Could an individual mission--like Apollo 11--have been faked?
Non Technical Prof of Moon Landings (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1969 the Americans first landed men on the moon. Now some people have made names for themselves by saying that this and subsequent landings never happened. Their position is that NASA faked them in order to save face and fool the public. To prove their point they rely on explanations of the reported events using dubious science and lay explanations that any first year science major would and does, laugh at.
However, they always miss or purposely avoid the the one piece of irrefutable proof that it did in fact happen. That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_lunar.html [russianspaceweb.com]
Now if they wanted to get the goods on the Americans all they had to do was to land, photograph or explore with a rover the American landing sights. Just imagine the embarrassment not to mention the the damage to American credibility, at the height of the cold war no less, that such information would generate. Records even show that they never landed or even explored that areas that that American landings happened. So they did not even go and look to make sure because they knew it really happened.
But they did not. They did not use it to pressure the Americans to stop bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia where Soviet military advisers were being killed as a result. They did not use it to pressure the United States to stop sending military advisers to and providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation. They did not use it to stop the Star Wars program of the Regan administration.
In fact they did not even use it to turn the West's attention away from the Soviet Union during the Soviet Coup of 1991 when members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_coup_attempt_of_1991 [wikipedia.org]
Which every body knew was the last death throws of the Soviet empire. If they did not use the information then to turn the attention of the American, and world public, inward to their own governments lies and thus corruption and force it to ignore the events in the Soviet Union in order to deal with a damaging domestic and international issue. Then the proof of faked moon landings did not and never existed.
One final thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy tanked. People were selling all kinds of stuff owed by the crumbling state, ships, weapons, artworks and knowledge but nobody ever approached any Western news agency or tabloid to sell them this information. And to say that one would buy it but not publish is foolish. The seller could just keep peddling it until someone did and then it would be old news and worthless until then it would still be worth something.
Re:Lunar ruins (Score:3, Interesting)
My girlfriend often remarks to me when we see old American movies that 'that was when it was a much nicer America' not one so conditioned to lying to it's own people that no one knows what the truth is. Obviously I don't know what the actual truth is either.
My uncles and my father all watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing *LIVE*. As they were in Australia they were getting the feed slightly before the U.S did. I have no doubt that the moon landing happened but the three of them have all told me the same strange story about when they watched the moon landing.
I can't say exactly when they heard Armstrong, a man known for his calm under pressure, say in an excited voice:
"Huston, Huston: There is something large and suspiciously white moving off the crater ri.."
the transmission was cut off and they were left wondering what was going on.
I personally believe the majority of UFO sighting can be explained by high speed intelligence reconnaissance aircraft and UFO sightings were a convenient cover for their operations. Yet there may be some sort of conspiracy, not that we didn't land on the moon I have no doubt of that we did. But what actually happened may be much stranger [wordpress.com].
It seems kind of convenient that the original recordings of the moon landings have been "lost", who knows maybe the story of faked moon landings is yet another cover story. The only way to be sure is to see and hear the recordings of the original moon landing in it entirety from separation of the LM and CM to the docking of the LM to the CM. It's simple really, as it's is a significant piece of human history, why can't I buy it somehow and listen and watch without commentary? Surely, since nothing about the mission is classified, I should be able to do that, so why is it so difficult to find, even just to connect to what was achieved all those years ago?