More obviously, anyone on the opposite side of the Earth is not in the photo: if you take a photo of a mountain, you can’t claim someone on the other side is in it.
Can we actually see Aldrin and Armstrong in that photo? Please point out to me. Thanks
They said “inside the frame of the photo”, not “in the photo”.
This is a downlinked image from a Navy Standard SM-3 anti-ballistic missile moments before impacting a target in space.
In Feb. 2008 the same missile system intercepted a satellite in space, but there is no available on-board imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euTQXH-ObGs
In 1981 during the first space shuttle mission STS-1, a KH-11 spy satellite imaged the shuttle in orbit at high resolution to check for damage to the thermal protection system. Unlike other space-to-space photos, this was likely taken from hundreds of miles away with both vehicles in separate orbits, requiring significant motion compensation by the KH-11. No images of that are publicly available, but for the photos to be useful the resolution would have to be very high, probably a few inches.
And weren’t there persistent rumours of Soviet cosmonauts drifting off into space in failed missions before Apollo 11? Almost certainly false, of course…
There may well be cosmonauts who died on their missions, but whose existence is still not publicly acknowledged. But it’s absolutely impossible that there are any who “drifted off into space”. It might be possible on a Moon mission, but it’s impossible to keep a Moon launch secret, and the one single attempt the Soviet Union made at anything that could conceivably be big enough to be a manned Moon mission failed (rather spectacularly) on the launch pad, not out in space.
Very cool. Thanks for finding that.
The Rosetta probe took some images of the Philae lander on its way down to comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
And some NASA engineers requested spy satellite imaging of the same Shuttle during the STS-107 mission, but it didn’t get done, and the Shuttle (Columbia) was destroyed during reentry.
That imaging of a Shuttle by a spy satellite makes me think that this may be routinely done in other cases. That is, spy satellite vs spy satellite. Not sure how much can be learned by looking at the outside of one from a distance, but I’m sure they look anyway. Of course, they also probably look from the ground, but from an orbiting satellite there’s no atmosphere to interfere with the view. And I’m sure there’s some maneuvering/counter-maneuvering to get a better view and avoid giving a good view.
You probably wouldn’t learn anything interesting by pointing a spy satellite at another spy satellite, that you couldn’t learn more easily through other means. If a spy satellite has a clear view of a point on the ground, then that point on the ground also has a clear view of the spy satellite.
Was that intentional?
You could get a lot closer to the other guy’s satellite than the ground. And you wouldn’t be looking through a lot of murky atmosphere. The view is potentially much better than from the ground.
Certainly was. Pete Conrad wanted a better souvenir than just some Moon rocks.
What I meant was, did NASA intend for Apollo 12 to land within walking distance of Surveyor?
“Walking distance” is very, very small compared to the size of the Moon, and there have been very, very few landing sites. The chances of that happening by accident are so low as to be effectively zero.
Of course they did. Anything that significant on the Apollo missions was not a matter of chance. I was just joking about the souvenirs. Well they did remove a few parts and bring them back, but the astronauts didn’t get to keep them.
Only if you are very, very lucky and just happen to have a spy satellite whose orbit brings it close to the other guy’s satellite. Or launch a new satellite just to spy on one specific target in orbit.
Landing near Surveyor was done for a couple of reasons: One was that they wanted to prove out the ability of the LEM to make precision landings. The other was that they wanted to bring back some parts from Surveyor to understand what a few years on the moon does to the equipment.