Spacecraft Snoops Apollo Moon Sites

[punychicken]

Story

A European spacecraft now orbiting the Moon could turn out to be a time machine of sorts as it photographs old landing sites of Soviet robotic probes and the areas where American Apollo crews set down and explored.

New imagery of old Apollo touchdown spots, from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) SMART-1 probe, might put to rest conspiratorial thoughts that U.S. astronauts didn’t go the distance and scuff up the lunar landscape. NASA carried out six piloted landings on the Moon in the time period 1969 through 1972.

Fringe theorists have said images of the waving flag -- on a Moon with no atmosphere -- and other oddities show that NASA never really went to the Moon. No serious scientist or spaceflight historian doubts the success of the Apollo program, however.

"We are observing some of the landing sites for calibration and ground truth purposes," said Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program.

Foing told SPACE.com that the SMART-1 orbiter circling the Moon has already covered the Apollo 11, 16, 17 landing sites, as well as spots where the former Soviet Union’s Luna 16 and Luna 20 automated vehicles plopped down. The images have not yet been released.

Detailed search planned

Given SMART-1’s initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts, Foing explained. Using its ion engine, the probe has successfully spiraled down further to an altitude closer to the Moon.

Foing said that each Apollo site, where the engine blast of the two-person landing craft stirred up the landscape, could be worthwhile targets for SMART-1 imaging.

"We shall search for them, with measurements not only in black and white, but also in three colors giving some information about minerals, weathering or [rocket engine] plume disturbance," he said.

SMART-1 operators also plan sequences that keep the probe’s camera specially trained on some landing sites as it sweeps overhead, Foing said. Along with these observations and others, the spacecraft will also be busy gleaning data in preparation for future international lunar exploration missions, he emphasized.

SMART-1 arrived in lunar orbit last November. Last month, ESA announced that the lunar mission would be extended by one year, pushing back the mission end date from August 2005 to August 2006.

The extension permits stereo measurements of select areas of interest. Doing so, topography maps of specific lunar real estate can be created. Mapping prospective landing sites for future robotic and human missions are possible too.

Why not Hubble?

If SMART-1 can get an eyeful, why not use the Hubble space telescope to take photos of the Apollo landing sites? Hubble did photograph the Moon, in 1999.

"Anything left on the Moon cannot be resolved in any Hubble image," According to the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA. "It would just appear as a dot."

Meanwhile, the trickiest task that the SMART-1 scientists have set themselves is to use a spacecraft spectrometer to look for the infrared signature of water ice, and perhaps frozen carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide too. Previous missions have provided evidence for water ice tucked away in permanently shadowed polar craters.

Any water on the lunar surface would be very helpful in the creation of permanent bases on the Moon, as outlined last year by President Bush. Other nations have Moon plans, too.

But to have survived, the water must be in the form of ice in places always hidden from the Sun. Such dark places exist, notably in the bottoms of small craters in the Moon’s polar regions.

 

[rjmrjmrjm]

Perhaps this will put pay to the conspiricy theories? Or perhaps it is an elaborate deception, thickening the conjecture.

 

[Pete Younger]

Yep, you cant kill a good conspiracy, just ignore the evidence and add another layer.

 

[nambo2]

NASA and all sensible scientists, people who matter, know they went there, so why all the effort and expense to show the silly conspiracy theoryists further evidence?, you just wouldnt bother would you, unless they really where lying and want to convince us that they are not?

I personally belive they went there.

But Iam not so sure now.

Nambo

 

[rynner2]

NASA and all sensible scientists, people who matter, know they went there, so why all the effort and expense to show the silly conspiracy theoryists further evidence?, you just wouldnt bother would you, unless they really where lying and want to convince us that they are not?

The prime purpose of Smart is scientific research, and testing its ion engine. (And it's European, so has no particular interest in boosting a great American achievement.)

Looking for spacecraft landing sites is just an exercise in calibration and testing camera resolution.

I don't suppose the researchers give a sh*t about conspiracy theorists!

 

[austen27]

Russian Conspiracy

The Russian Lunar rovers fascinate me. I have heard Soviets sent to robotic rovers to the moon around 1970 and took days of video as they rolled across the surface - but I haven't seen any stills or film from theses robots either in books or on the web. I've seen photographs of a model of the robot but no evidence of it landing on the moon. Has any one else? I think it is more likely that their was a Soviet conspiracy to claim a lumar landing that didn't happen than an Americn one.

Any one ever seen a Russian lunar movie? :?:

 

[naitaka]

The Lunokhod rover spawned its own bizarre theories:

The feat of remotely driving the unmanned Lunokhod lunar rover around the lunar surface must have seemed a bit beyond Soviet technology for some Muscovites. So an urban legend was put about that the diminutive Lunokhod was actually driven by a midget KGB agent on a one-way suicide mission to the lunar surface. How sufficient provisions were packed into the tiny rover during its eleven month mission was not explained...

http://www.astronautix.com/astros/kgbdwarf.htm

 

[austen27]

The Lunokhod rover spawned its own bizarre theories:

The feat of remotely driving the unmanned Lunokhod lunar rover around the lunar surface must have seemed a bit beyond Soviet technology for some Muscovites. So an urban legend was put about that the diminutive Lunokhod was actually driven by a midget KGB agent on a one-way suicide mission to the lunar surface. How sufficient provisions were packed into the tiny rover during its eleven month mission was not explained...

http://www.astronautix.com/astros/kgbdwarf.htm

Thanks for finding this Naitaka!

I still want to know is anyone has ever seen any film taken by the Lunohhod? In 1969 Nasa could only broadcast ten frames a second in sequential colour from the lunar surface, I would be surprised if the Soviets could do better! Still I think they are the only Nation (ex-nation?) to have made a sucessful Venus landing.

 

[rynner2]

Not film, but I do have in front of me, in a book, a pic of the track left behind Lunakhod I in 1971. The book ('Planetary Exploration', by Arthur Smith, 1988) also has 3 pages of text on the Lunakhods.

 

[FelixAntonius]

Not film, but I do have in front of me, in a book, a pic of the track left behind Lunakhod I in 1971. The book ('Planetary Exploration', by Arthur Smith, 1988) also has 3 pages of text on the Lunakhods.

Do you mean this:-

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?met ... tab=2222_1

The thing that puzzles me, is a recent e-mail from NASA/JPL in which it is claimed:

"The JPL team tested the theories by beaming laser pulses to four Moon reflectors from McDonald Observatory in western Texas, and an observatory in southern France. The lunar reflectors bounced the laser beams straight back to Earth, where the roundtrip travel time was measured. Three of the reflectors were installed by the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts, and one built by France was carried on the unmanned Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover."

But the following site:-

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?met ... tab=2222_1

Says:-

"The Lunokhod was not left in a position such that the laser retroreflector could be used indicating that the failure may have happened suddenly."

Make of this what you can!!!!!

 

[rynner2]

According to the book, both Lunakhods carried the French made laser reflectors, giving Earth - Moon distances to within 30 cm.

But perhaps one was inaccessible at the end of the mission, for whatever reason. Wouldn't be the only unmanned probe to suffer failure!

(BTW, the pic in my book is not shown on either of those web pages. Not surprising, since the Lunakhods returned so many pics.!)

 

[austen27]

Thank you Rynner & David.

These images do answer my questions. The terrain shown looks very similar to the NASA images and, to me at least, indicates that both are genuine (or the Soviets and NASA shared a film set! ). Fictional Lunar surfaces depicted in fims before Apollo 11 tend to be very variable.

 

[sunspot8]

NASA and all sensible scientists, people who matter, know they went there, so why all the effort and expense to show the silly conspiracy theoryists further evidence?, you just wouldnt bother would you, unless they really where lying and want to convince us that they are not?

I personally belive they went there.

But Iam not so sure now.

Nambo

Sorry but....are you serious? SMART 1 is a science and technology demonstration mission, its mission IS NOT to debunk conspiracy theories.

SMART-1 Homepages: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/i ... fareaid=10
http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/SMART-1/index.html

 

[HopoUK]

Well, I have just watched a documentary on the Sci-Fi channel here in the UK called "Conspiracies", or was that simply "Conspiracy"? Tonight it was about this very subject, men on the moon, and if it was faked or not.

Looking at the evidence provided by the show, it does go a long way in favour of a hoax.

Points of interest were this:

1. As there is no atmosphere on the moon, the night sky should have been crystal clear. But in the video footage and photos, there are no stars, just Earth!

2. In the photos taken by the astronauts, they have crosshairs on them as a point of reference, however, some of the crosshairs were partially hidden by objects when they should not have been. A sign that the images were doctored.

3. The flag of course. It moves as if there was a wind blowing. On the Moon????

4. The shadows look as though there was 2 sources of light, when there should have been only one source, the Sun.

5. The Radiation Belt. Radiation from the sun surrounds the Earth for thousands of miles, and to protect the astronauts, they would have needed the hull of the Apollo spacecraft to have a thickness of 6 feet of lead to protect them. Also, with no atmosphere on the moon, that also is bombarded by solar radiation, and spacesuits are simply not enough to protect against radiation, let alone the Apollo spacecraft.

With all this evidence, and more, I'm inclined to believe that the manned mission to our satellite was a hoax, brought about by the Cold War, and the prestige of being the first to send man to the moon.

And why haven't they sent more astronauts to the moon? Because it is not possible with the technology that we have, even today. Not unless they can build a craft that has 6ft of lead hull, and then find enough power to get it off the ground. If they had carried on with the Hoax, it would have been discovered eventually, so to make sure that did not happen, they stopped the missions.

If anyone can provide conclusive proof that they did land on the Moon, then please provide it here for all to see. Maybe then I can believe.

 

[tastyintestines]

We have mucho pages of discussion, and a nifty search engine.

 

[WhistlingJack]

If anyone can provide conclusive proof that they did land on the Moon, then please provide it here for all to see. Maybe then I can believe.

Moon reflectors

 

[OneWingedBird]

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy page has a lot of info on the moon landing hoax theories.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

On the lack of stars:

Bad: The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?

Good: The stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.

This is usually the first thing HBs talk about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes me, as it's the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars. Therefore we should see them from the Moon as well.

I'll say this here now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.

The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.

On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.

So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.

So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!


On the lack of crosshairs:

Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.

Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?

What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.


The 'wind' in the flag:

Bad: When the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.

Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.

New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?

The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.

This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!


On the lighting:

Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.

Good: This is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?

The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces.

This effect is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). You can find some neat images of it at here, for example. This also explains another HB claim, that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight. This is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You can reproduce this effect yourself; wet grass on a cool morning will do it. Face away from the Sun and look at the shadow of your head. There will be a halo around it. The effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like that in a baseball diamond infield. Or, of course, on the Moon.


And on the issue of 'lethal radiation':

Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.

Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''

This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!

It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.

 

[rynner2]

All the pros and cons of the 'Hoax theory' were thoroughly thrashed out here
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=271

so I don't think we need to go over it again on this thread.

The clincher is that the Russians never claimed it was hoaxed, because they had the technology to know where the radio signals were coming from - they could track the Apollo's all the way to the moon and back.

 

[HopoUK]

This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!

Well you definitely know more about Space and science much more than I do. The radiation belt theory is what convinced me most that it was a hoax, but after reading your explanations, I'm not so sure now. Just one question. What about the radiation on the surface of the moon? The astronauts would have been exposed to it much longer.

 

[Anonymous]

...

Well you definitely know more about Space and science much more than I do. The radiation belt theory is what convinced me most that it was a hoax, but after reading your explanations, I'm not so sure now. Just one question. What about the radiation on the surface of the moon? The astronauts would have been exposed to it much longer.

Plenty of hard (cosmic) radiation, gamma rays etc. But, most of it passes straight through your average astronaut and silver foil space ship. Real problems start when said astronauts get caught in the excess, accelerated ionising, particle radiation (gamma, beta and alpha particles, etc), from a solar flare.

Short flights to the Moon and back, probably fell well within acceptable risk limits.

Just think of those cosmonauts who spent many, many months in MIR space station, soaking up the rays.

 

[fluffle9]

I saw that Conspiracies thing, sort of. My ex-boyfriend was watching it, yelling angrily at the television (he's an astrophysicist).

Well you definitely know more about Space and science much more than I do. The radiation belt theory is what convinced me most that it was a hoax, but after reading your explanations, I'm not so sure now. Just one question. What about the radiation on the surface of the moon? The astronauts would have been exposed to it much longer.

The Van Allen belts do not extend anywhere near as far as the moon, so there is no problem there. The problem is just in going through the belts.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt :

Conspiracy theorists have argued that space travel to the moon is impossible because the Van Allen radiation would kill or incapacitate an astronaut who made the trip. In practice, even at the peak of the belts, one could live for several months without receiving a lethal dose.

Apollo nevertheless deliberately timed their launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation. Astronauts that have travelled to the moon probably have an increased lifetime risk of cancer, but would be expected not to (and did not) have noticeable illness.