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Posts Tagged ‘Apollo 11’

And in other news, the sky is blue …

Friday, July 17th, 2009

 

What is It?

What is It?

Can you tell what you are looking at in this picture? Hint: In the dead center of the picture, look for something that doesn’t cast a shadow like anything else. Instead of a depression, look for a tiny bright spot that casts a long shadow horizontally across the moon’s surface.

Did you find it? You’re looking at the Apollo 11 Lunar Module! (Actually, it’s just the descent stage, which remained on the moon when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took off in the ascent stage.)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) took the picture earlier this month, along with photographs of all the other Apollo landing sites except for Apollo 12. NASA released all the photographs today.

This is a piece of news that SHOULD be about as surprising as, “Scientists today released photographic proof that the sky is blue.” Nevertheless, it is actually huge, because there has been a small but vocal contingent of people claiming in recent years that all of the Apollo moon landings were faked. They even managed to convince the Fox television network to run a special about the “moon hoax” a few years ago. It’s now going to get a lot harder for them to make their case.

The place you should go to read about all of this is Phil Plait’s wonderful blog, Bad Astronomy. Plait has run a website and a blog for years that debunks silly claims like UFOs, faces on Mars, etc. … and one of the battles that he has fought all this time is the one against the moon-hoaxers. So for him, the release of these NASA images must be a huge personal triumph.

What’s so great about it is that here is one case where the conspiracy theorists have gotten themselves trapped — they have occupied a position that can slowly, bit by bit, get chopped out from underneath them, as the LRO missions and other missions get higher- and higher-resolution pictures. This is something that we can only dream of in some of the other contentious non-debates that science has to deal with. Imagine, for example, that we could actually go back into the past and get photographic proof of evolution happening … but we’ll never be able to do that. And so the evolutionism versus creationism non-debate will go on forever. However, for the moon-hoax non-debate, I think the end may be in sight.

Now let’s put that aside, like a bad dream, and also appreciate these pictures for what they show. I love the Apollo 11 picture precisely because the Apollo 11 lander is so different from anything else in the picture. It really says, “We are the aliens here.”

Next, here is part of the photograph of the Apollo 14 landing site.

Apollo 14 Landing Site

Apollo 14 Landing Site

Here the lighting was so good that you can actually see the astronauts’ footprints leading from the lander (right) to the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (left of center). Amazing! Of course, as my wife said, “Are those footprints or footprint-shaped craters?”  ;-)

Also the photograph of the Apollo 16 landing site documents another little bit of Apollo history:

Apollo 16 landing site

Apollo 16 landing site

In this one you can see the shadow of the lander extending all the way across a nearby crater. Apollo 16 came perilously close to landing in this crater, and the photo shows what a close call it was. Quoting from David M. Harland’s book, Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions: “They were in the centre of a subdued crater about 100 metres wide. What they did not discover until they ventured outside, was that the rear footpad was a mere 3 metres beyond the rim of the 15 metre crater that Young had lost sight of [while landing the LM]. When he had hovered to select a spot on which to land, he was directly over the crater, and had narrowly missed landing on the rim.”

Fascinating stuff, and a wonderful 40th-anniversary treat from NASA!

Tags: Apollo, Apollo 11, David Harland, footprints, landers, LRO, lunar surface, Phil Plait
Posted in Media, Missions | 3 Comments »

Forty Years Ago

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Apollo 11 Launch -- 9:32 AM, July 16, 1969

Apollo 11 Launch -- 9:32 AM, July 16, 1969

 ”If God had wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.” — Krafft Ehricke

Q: “Was there ever a moment on the moon when either one of you were just a little bit spellbound by what was going on?” — A: “About two and a half hours.” — Neil Armstrong (Postflight Crew Press Conference, 8/12/1969)

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 astronauts started out on the first journey of humans to another world. At that time I was a 10-year-old boy, and very much caught up in moon fever. Of course I watched the launch, the landing, and Armstrong’s famous first step on the moon. The astronauts’ moon walk occurred after my usual bedtime, so it was kind of like getting to stay up late on New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve.

I spent some time today checking out websites about the fortieth anniversary. Probably the coolest one has to be www.wechoosethemoon.org, a production of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which has streaming audio of the mission just as it was recorded 40 years ago. Unfortunately, when I visited the site it was 40 years after the astronauts went to sleep, so there wasn’t any conversation going on, just static! But still there was a nice animation of where the astronauts were at that time, and some little factoids about the 60s in the corner of the screen.

NASA has a list of anniversary events going on around the country. I’m planning to attend one of them, the Moonfest at NASA Ames Research Center on Sunday, which will be followed up by the second annual Lunar Science Forum from Tuesday to Thursday next week. To my mind, the latter is really the most exciting moon event next week. That’s because unlike all the other events, it focuses on what is going on right now, instead of looking back forty years. I plan to attend on Tuesday at least, and I definitely plan on blogging about it.

Smithsonian Magazine has a couple of interesting articles on its website. One, “Moonwalk Launch Party,”  was written by a photographer who took pictures of people watching the launch. Be sure to check out the comments. Several readers talk about their memories of the launch, and one reader even says that he (at age three) is in one of the pictures! (Click on “Photo Gallery” to see the pictures.) Another article, “Apollo 11′s Giant Leap for Mankind,” is about the Lunar Module — perhaps the most unique piece of technology developed for the Apollo landings. Nothing like the Lunar Module had ever been made before. It would be useless on Earth; it was technology that only made sense on the moon.

Smithsonian’s sister magazine, Air & Space, has a treasure trove of articles, some old and some new, on the Apollo missions. They call it “An Apollo Anthology.” I’ve just begun to dig into it. Check out, for example, “Apollo’s Army,” which talks about the other 400,000 people (besides the astronauts) who worked on Apollo. The reader comments on this one are really good, too. The article and the comments make you realize how the missions were a shared endeavor of our whole country. Also, Air & Space has a blog, Apollo Plus 40, that will be running all this month, so you can keep coming back to it.

Finally, after reading all the rah-rah stuff, maybe you will be ready for a rather dyspeptic article that basically bids good riddance to the moon. If so, check out Robin McKie’s article in the Guardian. As you might guess, I don’t really agree with McKie’s point of view. But I think that it’s important for all moon supporters, like me, to listen to and think about his arguments.

Tags: Apollo 11, looking back, looking forward, websites
Posted in Media, Missions | No Comments »

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