LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

by drm237 • 17 years ago

33 16 17 years ago

asmithmd1• 17 years ago

Will these images quiet "the moon landings were faked" conspiracy theorists? I doubt it - they will reason if they faked the moon landing, they can easily fake a few digital pictures.

Notice how close Apollo 16 landed to a huge crater. I wonder what kind of resolution the mission planning maps had.

vermontdevil• 17 years ago

No it won't shut them up. Not when CNN is blathering on their site about the the fake moon landings theories.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Remember when CNN used to be a news network?

Now it's a moving-picture tabloid

stewiecat• 17 years ago

When I saw that on CNN's front page this afternoon they lost any remaining shred of journalistic integrity that I had for them. Stuff like that puts them on par with Weekly World News.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I highly doubt it. To a conspiracy theorist any evidence is evidence that they are right.

sailormoon• 17 years ago

Sigh. What is really annoying, is that conspiracies really do happen. Things go on all the time that many people would like to know about. Theories abound, and then decades later we find out a lot of it was actually true. ECHELON used to be a "conspiracy theory". MKULTRA. These NSA backdoors all over the place. They were all "whoo conspiracy" until suddenly they weren't.

But there's this certain type of person, the "Conspiracy Theorist" type, who is just an utter idiot, denies all reality, and doggedly defends the biggest, most unbelievable conspiracy they can find, and in the most discreditable manner possible. They are so stupid, obnoxious and loud that they paint the whole idea of "governments doing naughty things in secret" in this ridiculous, indefensible tone. They turn the whole issue into a laughing stock.

Consider these two statements on, say, 9/11. I know we're not talking about that, but it's illustrative of the problem I'm describing:

  A. Elements in the govt know a lot more about 9/11 than has been revealed
  B. The CIA planted explosives in the twin towers and used a missile on the Pentagon

To me, statement A is reasonable. Many people consider the 9/11 commission to have been a complete joke. There are plenty of weird things about the "official" explanation. I personally think there is quite a bit more to the story, I think it's a near certainty that there has been a cover-up of sorts, and I think there's plenty of intelligent people around who have similar ideas.

But you can't even mention them because of these nutcases shouting about B. They take such a ludicrous, extreme position that no-one can differ from the party line at all without risking being tarred with that highly toxic brush. They poison everything.

I'd like to mention, btw, that some people believe that those "truther" types are being deliberately manipulated for the very reason that they attract the spotlight away from some pretty dark places that it's in no-one's interest to light up. Evidence for this theory includes such things as the refusal to release the many videos showing the pentagon impact. I can think of no other reason than to inflame wild speculation. Meanwhile the real questions go un-asked and un-askable.

It's because of this that it pains me so much to see these "Conspiracy Buffs" - these morons, these wilfully ignorant tools spouting this fucking nonsense. And so once again, everything is polarised. Any skepticism of the fairytale means you're a fucking loon. Let's have another A/B:

  A: NASA possesses unreleased photographs of some pretty interesting things
  B: THE MOON LANDINGS ARE FAKE!

One of these statements is acceptable to me. There are plenty of people, usually the type of person entrusted with total control of an extremely expensive aircraft, who say they have seen interesting things in the sky. Some people claim NASA has seen a great many of these interesting things, and unlike your average pilot, has cameras all over the place, so they have pics. Now personally I'm not very convinced of this one, I will need very good evidence, but it's a semi-reasonable thing to say.

The second is just nonsense, easily disproved, and just makes anyone who is even slightly inquisitive "behind the scenes" look like an idiot. Sigh! The dark side clouds everything.

Oh well, I'm not sure what the point of this rant was, besides this: please make an effort to keep a nuanced outlook on "conspiracy theories". There are conspiracies all the time, count on it. Don't just dismiss them all wholesale because a bunch of crazies has latched noisily onto the stupidest ones.

Batsu• 17 years ago

Showed them to a coworker, that was his first response.

I sit among a large group of conspiracy theorists at my work.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

The really interesting thing here is that people are now so far removed from what humanity is capable off that they have no choice but to take it as possible that all this was faked.

If they had a good general education and a healthy dose of common sense they could easily figure out for themselves what is possible and what is not.

I attribute this to general education being a lot worse than it was two generations ago.

Sure we have pretty toys, computers and all kinds of media devices. But people in general (not the HN crowd) can't do general arithmetic anymore without a calculator, which gives them a bad intuition about numerical problems and they're more concerned with 'stuff' than with knowledge.

Of course there are exceptions, I'm sure there are plenty of schools that do a great job and that hold the tradition of education high. But the general case has slipped backwards, every school that I have had contact with because of my sons education couldn't hold a candle to the highschool I was in when comparing the level of the knowledge taught in the various classes.

I remember my son coming home and telling me they do this weird thing called 'touch math' here and how the teacher wanted them to use calculators for simple arithmetic questions...

Semiapies• 17 years ago

The real question is whether Hoagland and the rest of the face-on-Mars/giant-towers-on-the-moon crowd will say these pictures are really alien structures on the moon that NASA is trying to pass off as the Apollo landing site...

kaiuhl• 17 years ago

I was really expecting / hoping that they would release high resolution, quality images of these landing sites, particularly Apollo 11.

Don't we have the technology to capture these sites in striking clarity, to finally put to rest the ridiculousness of claims we didn't get there when we did?

drm237• 17 years ago

From the article:

Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

DougWebb• 17 years ago

I think the coolest of these is the Apollo 14 image with the footprint trail. Sure, after 30 years we'd expect the landers to still be there, but now we know that the footprints and other scuff marks are still there too. Neat.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

I read somewhere that, if humanity died out, after a few million years, all evidence that we existed on earth would be gone, expect the junk we left on the moon.

tocomment• 17 years ago

Can anyone explain this issue (http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/925dl/apollo_landin...) Google moon not matching these images? INACT (I'm not a conspiracy theorist) just curious.

LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites

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