Images Show Apollo Moon Flags Still Standing 206
TheNextCorner writes "Images taken by a NASA spacecraft show that the American flags planted in the Moon's soil by Apollo astronauts are mostly still standing. Each of the Apollo missions planted an American flag in the soil at their landing sites. Scientists had previously examined photos of the Apollo landing sites for the flags, and had seen what looked like shadows cast by them on the lunar surface. Now, researchers have studied photos of the landing sites taken at different points during the day (and under different illuminations) and have observed shadows circling the points where the flags are thought to be."
Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
You'd think that the flags would've been knocked over by all that lunar wind by now.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
Or the desert wind rolling north from Mexico...
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Informative)
You joke, but (IIRC) the Apollo 11 flag was accidentally knocked over during lift-off (rocket engines, unsurprisingly, generate "wind"). They tried to plant the flags further from the craft during later missions, but I guess they were never 100% sure it didn't happen again (I'm about to RTFA to find out).
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It would've been fine, but Buzz was doing donuts just after lift-off, and "buzzed it".
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But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
The conspiracy theory nuts keep telling us that the moon landings were fake!
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They'll just say these photos are fake. They have to keep up the illusion.
Re:But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
The government was behind the moon landings!
No, seriously, the landings were faked, but they were filmed on the moon. We've had a base up there since 1958. "We can't film the dark side... for some reason."
It's a contrail factory.
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the moon base is run by jfk and elvis
oh, and the dark side cant be filmed because of the civilization of rock spiders there and because the monolith orbiting jupiter told us not to mess with them
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PS. if seven of nine ever runs for my electorate, i'll sure as hell be voting for her... WOOF!
Her ex-husband, Jack Ryan, was running for US Senate in Illinois, but dropped out of the race because of hanky-panky. The wikipedia article about it is pretty interesting.
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No, seriously, the landings were faked, but they were filmed on the moon. We've had a base up there since 1958.
Research has been uncovered that dates back to 1953
http://archive.org/details/Cat_Women_of_the_Moon [archive.org]
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Because the radiation levels are not as high or as lethal as many would have you believe.
The van Allen belts, to begin with, are regions of highly energetic particle radiation. Particle radiation can be shielded by quite thin sheets of light metals such as aluminium and plastics. Guess what the Apollo spacecraft was made from.... In addition, the belts are ust that: belts. Space trave is a 3-dimensional problem, and it is quite simple to arrange the flight path from Earth to the Moon such that it passes ove
Re:But...but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The spectrum of these particles extends way up - scientists are busily observing particles with energies on EeV scale (roughly what a moving golfball has), though these are quite rare.
Neutral particles, like gamma rays, can only be shielded by a bulk material - the penetration depth depends on density.
Lastly, we have we have direct visual observation [wikipedia.org] of cosmic rays by astronauts on Apollo missions and ISS.
In summary - being in space is kinda like being on a battlefield - if your general did not screw up the chance of being hit by an artillery shell is quite small. But this does not mean it cannot happen.
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Re:But...but... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because they're blithering retards. My advice is to tell them to fuck off, and if they still insist on blathering on, go Buzz Aldrin on them.
Re:But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
oblig http://xkcd.com/1074/ [xkcd.com]
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I figured they'll jump on the statement that all of the flags are still standing *except* Apollo 11's. They can then claim that one was faked to get in under the wire to hit the moon in the 60s on the first attempt while the subsequent ones were real.
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Obama's birth certificate is in the supply pouch (Score:2)
Re:But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
And these photos just provide more ammunition to them if they spin it correctly.
Take the Apollo 16 site image. The lunar rover is parked some 100 metres from the LEM but everyone knows that an American would never park their vehicle that far from their destination.
...
(Yeah, I know Young parked it there so the on-board camera could be used to capture the capsule ascent.)
Re:But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Then their last radio conversation would be "See, NASA didn't have the technology to bring them back, so they faked it instea......[croak]".
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Show them around the "sound stage" without a space suit.
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They wanted to test if the program "Mythbusters" is just a myth in one episode.
Unfortunately, Grant, Kari and Tori were allowed to do that one, so their experiment had gaping holes and proved inconclusive.
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so you're simultantiously rooting for a literal interpretation of the bible AND for the scientific acheivement of the moon landings.
wow. nice job.
10/10 troll. would read again!
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Perhaps you literally don't know the meaning of the word literal?
And the conclusion is correct - Reason is irrelevant to anyone who still holds to the idea that the moon landing was a hoax. There is no evidence you can show them that they will be unable to justify away.
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All myths have some basis in fact; I'd like to see that fact with respect to the Easter Bunny. I'm with you on the eggs, false advertising and where has he been stealing them from, eh? No one ever asks that question.
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I hate Santa... my mom tried for years to get a picture of me sitting on Santa's lap as a child. No way in hell was I going near that freak... I don't care how many malls or stores we went too. The rest are fine as long as they stay out of my way.
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The niiight Santa went crazy. The night Saint Nick lost his mind.
Fake (Score:4, Funny)
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Not sure about the moon photos, but I think this might be photoshopped:
http://dailypicksandflicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/i-think-this-might-be-photoshopped-shark-t-rex-uzi.jpg [dailypicksandflicks.com]
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It's definitely photoshopped. They took out Jesus riding the unicorn. :)
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1) Those NRO surveillance satellites which have been declassified [wikipedia.org] are really big for something you'd send to the moon. You'd need to launch it on a Saturn5 or something similar to get it there.
2) Contemporary NRO operations are all classified, so we can only speculate [wikipedia.org] about what would be possible.
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Diffraction is the limiting factor even for earth orbiting telescopes, atmospheric distortion wouldn't enter the equation until you were looking at much higher resolutions.
The equation for the relationship is given in the second link I posted, if you're interested.
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So suppose you have satellite in 100km orbit around the moon with a 2.4meter aperture (like Hubble) using 400nm light. Then the smallest angle you can resolve is 0.034 arcseconds and you cannot resolve features smaller than 16mm. If you use red light (600nm) th
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this is interesting and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but it would be even MORE interesting if they WEREN'T there anymore.
We might even have a reason to go back and checkout what/who was moving our flags around :)
Re:this is interesting and all... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why wouldn't they be standing? Because of the exhaust from the lunar module ascent stage's rocket engine. The LM blew all kinds of crap around when it took off, and kicked up dust on the surface. Here's a video of the Apollo 17 lunar liftoff, taken from the lunar rover's remote controlled camera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iziumcklDbM [youtube.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Youtube never disappoints.
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it will spread out in a straight line
No, it will spread out in a cone. Movement from high pressure to low pressure happens in space, too.
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Check out an earlier post in this thread for the Apollo 15 video, which stays focused on the landing area. You see a lot more dust kicked up, and little pieces of the LM descent stage being blown off well after the ascent stage has departed, and dust stuck onto the camera lens afterward.
You're right that gas expansion into a vacuum is a tricky thing, but while the forward front of exhaust gas will move in a straight line, that gas will be moving outward at the speed of exhaust gas molecules (hundreds or th
Re:this is interesting and all... (Score:4, Informative)
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Thank you! That's the video I was looking for for my earlier post, but couldn't find.
Re:this is interesting and all... (Score:5, Funny)
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Image clarity (Score:2)
Moon or someone sneezed over a cappuccino.
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If we had any balls (Score:5, Insightful)
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Palin can see it from her house
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If we had any balls, we wouldn't have to forensically analyze long-distance data to figure out if the flags are standing or not. We'd just be looking out the damn window and see.
Area 51 is still closed to the public though :P
Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine having to go all the way back there and fix it.
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What a relief!
Imagine having to go all the way back there and fix it.
Now that we've given up on technology in the US, maybe the plan would have been to pray that the Chinese would fix it for us.
Re:Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
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Ms. Moneypenny, compose a letter to Bart Sibrel! (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Mr. Sibrel,
Hope that jaw doesn't ache too much from the jacking that Mr. Aldrin gave it.
Oh yeah, here's more proof from one of our lunar orbiters that there are, indeed, flags on the moon where the landings occurred and that all but one are still standing.
Hoax theory disproved bitch!
NASA
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Dear Mr. Sibrel,
Hope that jaw doesn't ache too much from the jacking that Mr. Aldrin gave it. Oh yeah, here's more proof from one of our lunar orbiters that there are, indeed, flags on the moon where the landings occurred and that all but one are still standing.
Hoax theory disproved bitch!
NASA
No, they will just change the conspiracy theory based on this new "evidence", like perhaps NASA had the Russians put that stuff on the moon back in the '80s or something. If you took the conspiracy nuts to the moon and showed them the lunar lander site they would say that they were drugged and hallucinated the whole thing rather than admit that they were wrong.
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As I've said before, I do believe that we landed on the Moon. But I enjoy playing a little devil's advocate. So, with that said...
The images are obviously real. And they show that something on the Moon changes according to the day. The assumption is that it is the flag. But it could be any oddly shaped thing.
So were I a conspiracy theorist, I'd point out that we never said that there weren't missions to the Moon. But were there any people on board? NASA proved that they could land on the Moon with th
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As I've said before, I do believe that we landed on the Moon. But I enjoy playing a little devil's advocate. So, with that said...
The images are obviously real. And they show that something on the Moon changes according to the day. The assumption is that it is the flag. But it could be any oddly shaped thing.
So were I a conspiracy theorist, I'd point out that we never said that there weren't missions to the Moon. But were there any people on board? NASA proved that they could land on the Moon with the Surveyor missions. So these could easily be Apollo landers that were sent to the Moon in order to echo back radio messages to convince people that they were originating on the Moon. They could drop a flag and such off before landing.
Heck, I should be on "Dancing with the Stars!"
As an aside, I've never really heard from the conspiracy theorists on this one: Were Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 faked? Apollo 8 was the mission that flew around the Moon. Apollo 10 was the one that went to the Moon with a LEM but didn't actually land. The whole "leaving the Van Allen belts would kill the astronauts" theory would seem to imply that those missions must have been faked.
Let's switch to new-school conspiracy theory: It's Obama's fault that they had to fake the moon landings. I'm not sure how but everything is Obama's fault right? After all he's the one that killed off all the dinosaurs, caused the great flood, started the civil war, Talked Napoleon into invading Europe, Made Hitler anti-Semitic, Shot JFK and RFK, and started Global Warming.
Wait, that's almost as credible as some of the moon landing conspiracy theories.
(I'm not a big fan of Obama by the way, I just thin
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As an aside, I've never really heard from the conspiracy theorists on this one: Were Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 faked? Apollo 8 was the mission that flew around the Moon.
After the crew of Apollo 1 died a horrible death, all of the later Apollo missions were unmanned.
Those capsules weren't ready to support humans until just before the Skylab missions.
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It's called an "airlock inspection".
Coincidentally... (Score:5, Funny)
Pics would be nice (Score:2)
Well, those would have been nice to see.
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Agreed. Multiple sample images would be great to see.
I'm afraid their phrase, "images taken at different times of day" is very imprecise. It's not like you can take images hour-to-hour of features on the moon and see significant changes. Since the moon rotates at 29.x days/rotation, obvious shadow changes (to our eyes) would only be observed by taking images Earth *days* apart. I'm surprised the BBC wrote this.
What will happen to that flag. (Score:5, Insightful)
About 15 years from now, the ambassador of the People's Republic of China will solemnly return that flag to the President of the United States. Some of the original Apollo astronauts will still be alive to attend. The flag will be placed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, for future generations of Americans to admire.
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That would be AWESOME. They'd have to include massive documentation to make the claim stick, but it could be done. Question is, does China have the big brass balls to do it. They just might, judging by their interest in the Olympics. It would indeed take at least 15 years. China's space program is nothing if not conservative.
Sadly, they won't do it. They know it would change the world. It might even make us look up from our smartphones. They're not actually all that anxious for that to happen.
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What do you think the flag and footprint would sell for at auction? Almost worth another lunar visit...
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"Oh yeah, well I don't see you with a fungineering degree"
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Nice troll.
This is called progress. The ultimate goal for our species is to be able to survive without the earthly ecosystem. In time, our planet will be gone, no matter what we do. There are many ways for the universe to screw our planet so the sooner we are able to thrive without it, the better.
It is an awful strategy to keep all the living species in one place.
I don't know what the big deal is... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know what the big deal is...
You can see all the flags clearly by going to "Google Moon" and then go to street view.
Of course, they've blurred the license plates on all the LRVs.
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Can be viewed online or thru Google Earth.
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!soil (Score:3)
flags planted in the Moon's soil ..
The lunar surface has no soil. It's all regolith [wikipedia.org].
Minus one geek point for Samzenpus.
Oh Say Can You See (Score:2)
NASA is so proud they had "and the flag was still there" added to the National Anthem.
John Young (Score:2)
John and Charlie exit the LM on their first EVA. Charlie sees the big crater right behind the LM, literally one foot away. Charlie says hey did you know about that big hole back here John says what h... oh yeah I was watching that during the landing.
Fake! (Score:2)
You can clearly see by its shadow that it's moving in the wind. ...
If it's the BBC (Score:2)
Then they've decided to condemn the Capitalist Zionist illegal occupation of the Moon and therefore condemn Israel and Jews in general.
Re:Fuck Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why does it look like there is no gravity? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why does it look like there is no gravity? (Score:5, Informative)
As I recall (being old enough to have watched the whole thing on TV as a kid) - the moon flags have a rigid frame behind the fabric. Assuming the flag itself is made from actual fabric, which I don't remember. Anyway, the flags would not wave in a breeze.
It would be interesting to revisit the sites and see what kind of shape the flags are in - if there are holes punched through them, for instance.
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As there was no wind the flags all had a bar at the top to hold the flag perpendicular to the pole. They'd stay that way until UV destroyed them so much that it just fell off.
Re:Don't we have telescopes? (Score:5, Informative)
Not even Hubble can resolve that from LEO: http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php?id=77&cat=topten [hubblesite.org]
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I am not a telescope designer, but from what I understand, telescopes have sort of a fixed distance that they can focus in on. So a telescope that can show you Mars, for example, won't give you a really good close-up of your neighbor's left nipple as she stands naked in the window.
Umm.. (Score:2)
but you're cool with it if I still wanna try-- right?
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The real conspiracy is that the US flag says, "Made In China".
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Its a god damn flag on the moon. Who gives a shit? Oh Im sorry I forgot this isnt just any flag, its an AMERIKAHN FLAG!!!!! So that makes this earth shattering news.
No, the fact that it's on the moon makes it news. If there were any Pizza Hut flags on the moon, they'd be news too. It's just that... there aren't.