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Apollo landing sites imaged

BillC

Bazooka Joe
BillC
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The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has directly imaged Apollo landing sites, even to showing trails in the regolith disturbed by the astronauts. Check out the details provided by the (very excited!) Bad Astronomer.
 
That's cool! :cool:

I'd love to think that this would shut the conspiracy theorists up, but of course they'll just say that these pics are faked. :oldroll:
 
Or, that the job of the LRO was to plant the evidence itself, so when the Chinese get to that site, the U.S. evidence won't be missing!
 
Cool in theory, but the images themselves don't amount to much more than a smudge of shadow that's cast by the LEM base. I was hoping we'd be able to see struts and cinders.
 
Craig Fergerson on his show last night refered to the Moon Hoax people by their technical term

Jerks........ lol
 
I love this bit:

"But there is one dividing line that can inspire us, fill us with wonder, make us dream of bigger goals, higher aspirations, better ways to live our lives for the future. And that is the dividing line between the time we were a race shackled to the ground, confined to a single planet… and the time a human being stepped foot on another world."

beautifully put and made me all tingley....
 
I was thinking that, with no atmosphere, there's no reason the LRO couldn't skim along just above the tips of the mountains, and take really detailed photos.

Turns out that the tips of the mountains are about Everest-high, so I'm not sure why they're only planning to get within 30 miles of the surface. Any ideas on why they're not orbiting lower? Surface-to-air missiles?
 
The lower the orbit, the faster your orbital speed has to be to maintain that orbit. It would take me some time to get the math right to tell you what speed would be needed to orbit the moon that closely.
 
I've wondered that too. Maybe there's a point where variations in density below the satellite would interfere enough with the orbit to make it unstable? I.e. it would be possible if the moon were smooth and of uniform density, but it isn't?

ETA: It seems there are mountains 7km tall on the moon, so 30km may just be a margin of error / ability to correct kind of thing then.
 
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Also, I imagine a really close orbit would put the thing out of radio contact with us for longer periods of time.

ETA: And it would result in a smaller possible field of view.
 
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bokonon said:
I was thinking that, with no atmosphere, there's no reason the LRO couldn't skim along just above the tips of the mountains, and take really detailed photos.

Turns out that the tips of the mountains are about Everest-high, so I'm not sure why they're only planning to get within 30 miles of the surface. Any ideas on why they're not orbiting lower? Surface-to-air missiles?
Click to expand...

There is also the issue of latency--the time between data acquisition, transmission to a processor, the processing of the data, the formulation of an appropriate response, the transmission of the response to the LRO, and the execution of the response.

It is, indeed, rocket science ;)
 
leonAzul said:
There is also the issue of latency--the time between data acquisition, transmission to a processor, the processing of the data, the formulation of an appropriate response, the transmission of the response to the LRO, and the execution of the response.

It is, indeed, rocket science ;)
Click to expand...
Well, okay, if you were trying to fly the thing from Houston, and you really DID have to avoid SAMs, I can see where latency would be a problem. But that was supposed to be a joke, and since neither the mountaintops nor the landing sites are in motion, I don't see why everything couldn't be worked out ahead of time (rocket science!) to buzz the bases.

If they're only shooting from 8 miles high (cruising altitude for a jet), surely they won't be required to move so fast that images of the surface would blur due to camera motion. So, why not go in and get a closer look? Why fly more than three times that high?

Maybe they're saving that for year 3, after the other science is done. I hope.
 
My sister's boyfriend's roommate's pot dealer says the moon landings were faked. Anybody can Photoshop the descent module!
 
bokonon said:
Cool in theory, but the images themselves don't amount to much more than a smudge of shadow that's cast by the LEM base. I was hoping we'd be able to see struts and cinders.
Click to expand...

An image of the Apollo 14 landing site actually shows the tracks in the lunar dust left by the astronauts :)

ETA: and as the technology gets better, which it inevitably will, we'll get higher resolution images.
 
MattusMaximus said:
An image of the Apollo 14 landing site actually shows the tracks in the lunar dust left by the astronauts :)

ETA: and as the technology gets better, which it inevitably will, we'll get higher resolution images.
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I'll tell you like I told the nurse doing the ultrasounds:

I'll take your word for it, but I honestly don't see it.
 
bokonon said:
Well, okay, if you were trying to fly the thing from Houston, and you really DID have to avoid SAMs, I can see where latency would be a problem. But that was supposed to be a joke, and since neither the mountaintops nor the landing sites are in motion, I don't see why everything couldn't be worked out ahead of time (rocket science!) to buzz the bases.
Click to expand...

From which data? :bgrin:
 
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