Examples of imperfect and downright lousy Apollo photos abound. Besides, the primary purpose of the photographs was to document the mission to ground scientists. The photos scientists use as documentation are the same photos we look at for entertainment. There is no evidence of some secret stash of “real” photos that space scientists use to understand the Apollo missions.
Falsified photographs would have no value to scientists. Scientists would want the real photos, no matter how terrible. If such photos were completely unusable, then scientists would do without, not cobble together fakes pretending to be lunar photographs.
Sun angles varied from 13 degrees to 45 degrees. It is not valid to conclude all the photos were shot in relative darkness. I can take “sunny 16” photos under extreme sun angles on earth.
Exposure times are documented in actual cuff checklists and flight plans. Shutter speeds varied from 1/125 to 1/500, and f-stops from f/5.6 to f/11. These are suitable for “freezing” the action.
Focus was not typically an issue since few closeups were taken. The tool handle was a specific length that corresponded to a setting on the focus ring and could be used to measure the distance.
There are about 20,000 photographs taken during Apollo flights and during Apollo lunar EVAs. Most people have seen only a dozen of them. I can identify several poorly framed, poorly focused, and poorly exposed photographs. This suggests that there were indeed problems obtaining high-quality photographs. But the expecting lighting conditions and the nature of photography was not so insurmountable that usable photographs could not be taken.
Undoubtedly, but the credibility of your “possibility” relies on your ability to devise a plausible scenario requiring the falsification of photos.
Likely. That the descent engine affected the lunar surface is unquestionable. This effect was anticipated, and so the last hundred feet of the descent was expected to be flown using the LM’s instruments assuming the ground would have been invisible.
The effect of the ascent engine on the lunar surface is less certain because the descent stage interferes with the plume. The particulars of this interaction can’t be known with great certainty.
I believe you are wrong. The answer comes from the nature of rocket propulsion. Forgive me if I’m being pedantic, but I can’t presume everyone knows why rocket engines look the way they do.
Okay, combustion chamber. Big, strong chamber in which you burn propellants to produce rapidly expanding gas. Partially open at one end. The diamter of the opening is important. To small and you have a bomb, too big and you don’t have enough pressure for propulsion.
Gas pressure is the result of molecules moving in random directions. Get them moving in one direction and the pressure drops to zero. This is the role of the nozzle. The parabaloid nozzle converts pressure into velocity. Without the nozzle, the gas would escape from the hole in the combustion chamber in a roughly hemispherical pattern. This is bad because gas going in all directions fails to provide significant Newtonian thrust. You want all that gas going in one direction so that the equal and opposite reaction makes the rocket go the other direction. The more coherent the exhaust plume, the more thrust you get per unit of propellant.
An ideal nozzle will have an exit plane pressure exactly equal to the pressure of the outside atmosphere, if any. But in a vacuum that’s hard to attain. It’s impossible in practice to have a zero pressure at the exit plane, so the plume will always expand a bit into the vacuum. But it’s important to realize that it will not simply fan out in the hemispherical pattern suggested for the nozzle-less rocket above. In practice an exhaust plume in a vacuum is conical, as close to cylindrical as possible. As many of the gas molecules as possible have been directed to flow straight out the back.
Okay, freeze the ascent when the ascent stage is about fifty feet off the surface. The exhaust plume is going to look like a big cone extending down toward the surface. At the point where the base of this cone is wider than the descent stage, the plume will begin to impinge upon the surface with likely enough density and velocity to have at least some observable effect. From the descent films we understand that the descent engine began to visibly affect the lunar surface at an altitude of 80-100 feet. The engine was throttled to about 3,000 pounds thrust at this point. The ascent engine had a fixed thrust of 3,500 pounds, so it’s reasonable to expect visible surface perturbation up to an altitude of 80 feet. Depending on the exact amount of plume spread, it’s reasonable to suppose the direct impact zone of the exhaust plume would be on the order of dozens of feet.
But what about the first moments after ignition? This is where I need better drawings of the lunar module. See, you don’t want that nozzle placed right up against some solid surface like the upper deck of the descent stage. When you light that rocket off, it will blow up in your face. So you want to provide shunts to allow the exhaust gas to pass through the descent stage and have a place to go. The central core of the descent stage housed the descent motor, and it’s quite likely that the top deck of the descent stage was open so that the exhaust from the ascent stage would vent around the descent motor hardware and impinge on the lunar surface beneath the descent stage.
As I said, it would have been highly desirable to design it that way, but I can’t confirm that it actually was designed that way.
(In case you’re wondering, I used to be an aeronautical engineer. Now I write software for a living.)
But the contention that the exhaust plume from the ascent stage would have dispersed too rapidly to affect the lunar surface is contradicted by the design factors necessary for it to have worked at all.
As to whether the gas itself would have fouled the camera lens, I’m skeptical. Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide are very clean-burning fuels in a vacuum. There’s no discernible particulate exhaust, and no especially visible flame. The ignition transient lasts less than a second. The second stage of a Boeing Delta II rocket uses a motor identical in size, design, and fuel to the lunar module ascent motor. You can see wonderful footage of Delta II ascents.
The particles would be carried by the gas so long as the gas retained enough density to maintain the aerosol. Wherever the gas goes, there go the particles. As the gas density falls below that required to maintain the aerosol, the particles would transition to a ballistic trajectory, which would undoubtedly be parabolic arcs. But these would be quite flat arcs.
Bad Astronomer’s “little curlicues” are probably what I refer to as the “standing billows”. This is the dust that is propelled by the exhaust (on earth) into patches of air that are not especially disturbed by the exhaust flow. They may remain aerosolized there for several seconds or minutes, and exhibit rather random, lazy motion. This effect would not be visible on the moon because there is no atmosphere into which these particles would be propelled. Once the particles left the influence of the exhaust gas proper, they would ballistically fall to the surface.
The “flat sheets” I describe are those produced by particles carried directly in the exhaust gas, or following the flat arcs of the ballistic trajectories imparted by the gas.
As the exhaust gas strikes the surface, it does not reflect away in a hemispherical pattern. It tends to remain close to the surface, rising only slightly as it departs in a radial horizontal pattern from the point of impact.
Okay, but consider that you seem very anxious to find those impossibilities. Forgive us for mistaking presistence with predisposition.
Most hoax believers try to “sneak” into a debate carrying softened conclusions and conciliatory attitudes. It’s another poisoned well, I’m afraid. It’s good for you to be civil and conciliatory, but those aren’t sufficiently neutral colors in this debate.
Right from your choice of titles for the thread and continuing on into this particular post, you raise the spectre of the hoax theory. Even if your reference is simply to deny having drawn that conclusion, it’s there. I think you’re doing a good job of avoiding most of the typical pitfalls, but you keep conveying the impression that the hoax theory is your eventual destination. If we’re the ones perpetuating that at your expense, then it’s our fault.
I don’t “wish to allege” anything; I’m just trying to get some explanations.
I’ve presented some possibilities regarding this question, and there may well be other possibilities out there.
If the density of the exhaust plume was sufficient to keep the particles in aerosol in the first place. We need to establish that conclusively first.
This strikes me as very interesting, not immediately because of the dust-cloud question but because the 50-150m range given (assuming he’s talking radius, not diameter) matches perfectly with the figures in the space.com article. It’s nice to see Leonard David didn’t necessarily get it all wrong.
Eh, I don’t know; remember The Bad Astronomer said “In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust.” That doesn’t seem to fit with the conical-exhaust-stream model you seem to be proposing. It doesn’t sound like BA thinks the exhaust would ever have extended beyond the boundaries of the descent stage.
Why would that make the dust billow up off the ground as opposed to the lateral motion? Are you again assuming the exhaust gases were of sufficient density to lift the dust particles?
Could be either one, but he bailed out of this conversation long ago, so I’m not sure we’ll ever know what he meant.
Yes, but surely you realize that, when it comes to questions such as the behavior of dust particles in a vacuum when exhaust gases are introduced, most of us have a knowledge base not much greater than we had as children. That’s what I was trying to get at; just that ignorance is relative.
He seems to have no problem with dust displacement per se, but if I’m reading him right, he thinks the dust would never have really been kicked up off the ground and into the “air,” but rather blown out along the ground, and that only the dust immediately under or “a bit around” the exhaust would have been touched.
Well, I’m glad we somehow reached this agreement. We do appear to know the substance of the model (“particles suspended in a cloud of exhaust gases” is what I’m guessing you meant). Whether this model will prove valid remains to be seen.
This is what I meant by comparing us to children; were our knowledge of lunar physics sufficient, the answer to this question would be obvious, just as in the dog-on-the-moon case. I think you and I may agree more than we’re letting on…
[quoteI believe your attempt to construct the dichotomy based on Bad Astronomer’s statements is invalid.[/quote]
Well, you have to start somewhere.
As you’ve made clear in your arguments regarding inductive reasoning, the vast majority of humans do not know enough about all the disciplines involved to pass any sort of reasoned judgment on the matter. They accept it on faith, as you expect me to now.
Well, that’s simply not true. I believe my very existence proves that point.
Eh. I don’t understand it. “A bunch of whackos keep asking questions, so let’s just stop giving out any answers.”
That’s just lame.
God works in mysterious ways, eh? Well, they sure seem to have gone through a lot of trouble to prove that the face on Mars isn’t really a face. What’s so hard about this question?
So be it.
You make a good point here, but I can’t be held responsible for the behavior of other people.
I guess so. No distinction seems to be drawn by these debunkers, however, between plausible but unprovable hypotheses and simply provable hypotheses (of which there are a few in regards to the moon hoax).
I don’t know what it will take to convince you that it is possible to ask a question without having a conclusion in mind ahead of time. But trust me, it is possible.
Perhaps the disconnect here is that I never intended this to be in GD…
Well, if I don’t ask these questions, who will? I’m not about to leave it to the fanatical conspiratorialists, and most everybody else seems to think the questions are not worth asking.
Jesus, you were talking about the “a witness to the event would be stronger than one who merely noticed a forgery” statement? Well, that explains it. Didn’t mean to switch horses there, but this passage
perhaps because of proximity alone, led me to believe you were calling my dust-cloud arguments circular. Well, we sure have wasted a lot of time, haven’t we?
A noble sentiment, and one I appreciate.
But we may be able to conclusively show that such a process could not produce the observation in the film (no photos of “dust clouds” exist, to my knowledge)
May I ask what your investigation consisted of?
Fair enough.
I don’t think I’ve changed my position at all; there are still legitimate phenomena which could explain anomalies. I am drawing a distinction between anomalies and impossibilities, and that is, I think, why I appear to have changed my position. When I say impossible, I do mean impossible—akin to the dog on the moon. I am using “anomaly” simply to mean “unexplainable by me or the rest of the Dopers in this thread.”
I’ve got about 10 minutes to reply to jab1, so here I go…
You seem to be pulling me back into a discussion of all the evidence. So I’ll throw you a bone: check out the article entitled “Apollo Moon Rocks–Dirty Little Secrets,” in which you’ll hear from a scientist who’s found every moon rock he’s studied to be contaminated by “earthly” material. But I’m not interested in derailing this conversation yet again, when we seem so close to solving a few of these problems, so I’ll just say yeah, vanity could well have been it. People wanted to see pictures—that is what, for the average American, would pass as the truest proof.
I’ve done it too; I’m not saying it’s impossible. Just throwing ideas out there. If you don’t like 'em, fine. Help me answer my questions, at least.
It was a reference to a conversation with Chas.E earlier in this thread.
I’d say we need to learn more about what gases were expelled from the craft, for a start.
Those tripods are a good start. They spin horizontally (pan) and tilt up and down (tilt). Imagine one that’s got two motors (one for panning, one for tilting), and is under remote control, and you’ve got it.
And actually, the 45-degree thing bodes well for my earlier guess that there was only one speed to the motors. Ever play any of the old Atari home systems? With that cheap little joystick? There were four switches in there: up, down, left, and right. With such a joystick, you can control one of these pan/tilt heads (by the way, looking at the rover photo, it appears to have been mounted on a post, not a tripod ). Push up, the camera goes up. Push left, it goes left. But, push the joystick up and left at the same time, and both motors go, producing a 45-degree up-and-left motion for the camera. So, Fendell was pushing the joystick down and left, making the LM appear to go up and right. He pushes the joystick so that it’s only going down, and gets the straight-up LM motion. And then hard left to get the straight-right motion (and now that I think about it, if the LM were drifting down, that would explain the slight re-acquisition in the corner).
Going back up a bit, if the motors had more than one speed, angles other than 45 degrees would have been possible. Half-speed left and full-speed up would produce a motion of about 27 degrees, for example. Fully-analog joysticks, in which how far you hold the stick off-center corresponds directly to motor speed, can produce graceful curves if you’re gentle. If Fendell had had one of those, and the LM had been hanging motionless, it could have explained every single motion seen in the video, if we also assume that Fendell was drunk or having sex (or whatever other major distraction one can think of) at the time of launch.
BickByro wrote to me:
No, actually the point was to show that we can’t even look at one simple thing “in a vacuum” and come to any sort of legitimate conclusions - we need to examine other evidence to look at your questions. All the hypothesizing about exhaust plumes is another example of that.
Actually, there have been plenty of honest-to-God experts who’ve looked at the evidence in the last thirty years. Unless they’ve all been ‘bought’ by NASA, they all appear to have missed any gross inconsistencies like a mis-labelled rock photo (but see below).
And that’s still more indirect evidence: the only people declaring that the whole thing is a fake are those who are, as others have already said, underinformed or stupid. And no matter how loud they scream, I still have a hard time hearing them over the thunderous silence of real “rocket scientists” the world over, who’ve looked at the same data and said not one word about any obvious hoaxing.
I’ll admit this much: I haven’t had the time to examine all or even most of the evidence for myself, and I doubt I ever will. I do trust, however, that independent people more knowledgable than myself have done so, much closer in time to the actual landings (I was three when Apollo 11 landed - still have the newspaper my dad bought), and have never spoken up about any possibility of a hoax. It’s not necessarily NASA’s word I’m taking, more like theirs.
Yeah, but… There were at least dozens in the one big room at Ground Control during the missions, and hundreds of support people for them. Thousands watched Saturn Vs take off, without the need of a TV set. If the hoaxers (not you) are right, then all this activity and money-spending was staged. For what? But see below.
Look to the Moon for your answer. Let’s say it’s a quarter-full. You know where the light’s coming from because you know it’s a “mound” (the explanation is easiest when the mounds or pits are hemispheres). Negate the colors, and suddenly either the Sun has shifted positions or the Moon has zipped 180 degrees around in its orbit. Or, look at that 1/4 Moon and force your brain to turn it “inside out” (so that you assume you’re looking at the inside of a hemisphere) - again, the Sun moves. Negate the colors then, and the Sun moves back to its proper place.
When the mounds or pits aren’t spherical, you can get clues about where the Sun is coming from by looking at the light/shadow pattern in detail. In the case of these photos, though, we don’t have enough information about exact shapes, and most of them aren’t of high-enough resolution to be realiable in that sense, anyway.
I think that’d make me as unlucky as you used to claim Fendell was lucky. Seriously, though, I really would like you to investigate some of this yourself. There’s a big list of photos, and some of them mention directions. I looked at only a handfull before finding the rock, which was the best of what I saw in terms of unambiguous directions mentioned in the captions coupled with unambiguous shadows (for example, there’s one in which the caption claims it’s looking “south along the bottom of Hadley Rille,” but the shadows in that case are most-assuredly pointing northwest - the problem is that the Rille doesn’t go directly north/south except in a few places, and that photo doesn’t look like it was taken in any of them, so it’s the old “how can I be driving north on I-95 and west on 495 at the same time?” kinda thing).
Again, look to the Moon. Look at the Escher print, since it was made especially to examine the “mound/pit dichotomy.”
Big ones. Chew your head off if it weren’t in a big ugly helmet (that scares 'em).
It wasn’t vague to me at all - my playing with the time-delayed pan/tilt head was on a digital video system. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain how halving the resolution (in both directions) gives you four times the frame rate, but at the cost of some details. But to get to your point, go ahead and look at the two photos. Seems to me that the space.com photo is easily more than half the resolution of the pre-flight photo. Such a loss of resolution cannot easily explain the utter lack of anything but major craters in the plains. And perhaps that’s also partially due to bizarre contrast-enhancement. You don’t, for example, have to enhance all of the bandwidth equally. Colors close to a neutral gray could have been enhanced less than “outlying” colors. But once again, we’re getting off-track.
You’ll notice that on my Web page, I mention that it looks like the Sun is coming from the north-northeast in the space.com photo. I base this on how the light/shadow pattern changes around the western-most bend in Hadley Rille. When going around a bend, the line separating light from shadow should be perpendicular to the light rays themselves. But the sun lying largely to the north would appear to be highly unlikely (the landing site was around 26 degrees north). If the colors are negated, the Sun lies mostly to the south, which is possible, but it would also mean “lunar noon,” and the Rille wouldn’t be casting shadows into itself very much, except on east/west stretches (which we don’t see). More support for my “hell-and-back” hypothesis - I’ll assume the colors have “bled” to some extent due to processing.
Let’s see. AOL has three letters. If L is 1, then M is 2, and N is three. The photos have been twisted, and a twisted O is an 8, or two S’s, mirrored and superimposed. But a backwards S isn’t a letter. A is the only other letter available to us which is the same when mirrored, and since there are two strokes in an L, there must therefore be two As. Whaddaya get with two A’s, an S and as N? NASA. There. I’ve proven that NASA owns AOL and has programmed the browser to make 20-someodd million of us unable to learn the real TRUTH behind the Clementine photos.
Bwahahahahahaha!
Seriously, though. I poked around with NASA’a Clementine navigator some while at work today. Searching on “APOLLO 15” does indeed come up with nothing, if you leave the search radius at the default 0.25 degrees. At 5 degrees, there are at least 1000 images available for the UV/Vis and HIRES cameras combined (don’t forget to select an imaging system). The space.com photo is definitely not centered on the landing site.
But I still wasn’t able to turn up anything that looked even remotely like Hadley Rille, after having looked at hundreds of thumbnails. Many of them are of poor contrast, however. I’ve got my own contrast-enhancement I prefer over photoshops, and perhaps this weekend I’ll get some time to download and enhance some of the images.
There are other problems, though. According to NASA, Apollo 15 touched down at about 26N, 3E. I have yet to see one image from Clementine that wasn’t at least a full degree off in one or both, when searching on “APOLLO 15”, so either the mapping system used for Clementine was off by some amount, or they just don’t know where Apollo 15 landed. Or, NASA lies. I’ll try to look into more deeply soon.
Sure, but the problem is that you brought up the questions while tying them into the whole hoaxing mindset, which, as has been pointed out, is a poisoned well. If your goal from the outset was just to get answered, you pretty much doomed yourself with your choice of thread titles.
I can’t help thinking that instead of simply proclaiming that Irishman is your hero, you should perhaps make a completely affirmative statement that all you want are some answers, without even mentioning the possibility of a hoax. In fact, don’t respond at all to the points in this, my post, about the odds of hoaxing. Don’t reply to the other discussions on the probabilities and/or logic of the hoax arguments. Let them all go by, for the moment, and focus on what you’re now saying you really want, which appears to be an explanation of what you see.
Tell us you were drunk or stoned or similarly incapacitated when you selected the title for this thread, and beg to be forgiven.
If, after your questions have been answered as much as they possibly can be here, then you can choose to bring up the hoaxing/falsification issues again, if you feel you must - but I gotta warn you that the reaction will be much the same.
That wasn’t much sweat, either. I’d had a crappier Web page set up for comparison purposes already. I just cleaned it up and uploaded it. I didn’t expect you to argue the possibility that I hadn’t negated the images myself, and probably should have taken that as a grave insult, since it implied you thought I was talking out of my ass. Why I didn’t, but did think your comment to Kamandiwas insulting, I can’t say (probably a Great Debate in itself).
[qote]The problem is, Dave, you’re just about the only one trying to answer the questions!
[/quote]
Well, no, I’m one of the only ones who’s (now) willing to take your question as just questions. I’ve already spoken to the broader subject of the “overall” evidence (and do so again, in this post, above), and if you choose to continue to reject my input there, there’s not much more I can do (for example, I had to look up “parsimonious”). So, rather than just say, “screw it all,” since I do enjoy a good puzzle, and this provides me with self-education I’d otherwise not think to do, I’m willing to treat your questions as “just questions” for the time being.
To be honest, another reason for me offering “the arrangement” was to see how good a “scientist” you really were, since real scientists always questioning themselves, and are quite willing to prove themselves wrong. If you’re not interested in doing a whole lot of research for yourself, then, frankly, I’m really not interested in being a “Mr. Answer” for you. I’d much rather you see these things for yourself (as much as possible), since then you’re not taking my word for anything.
But it’s certain stuff you have questions about! No, I wouldn’t suggest you could possibly recreate the conditions needed for a dust cloud, or for the LM motion, or even for the space.com photo (which is why I suggested avoiding them as your first attempts). But I do think that if you went looking for shadows similar to the rover, for example, you’d find them all over the place.
How about because they’re not laying on the ground, but are instead up off the ground, in various places. Heck, you now know the blast from the engines was strong enough to damage the insulation and toss it around, so what’s a bunch of soft Moon dust in comparison? As JayUtah wrote: “The effect of the ascent engine on the lunar surface is less certain because the descent stage interferes with the plume. The particulars of this interaction can’t be known with great certainty.”
I thank you for the vote of confidence, but we still have yet to see whether or not I can add anything of value to the space.com issure besides showing that “the landing site should have been brightened” is consistent with the evidence as presented by NASA.
Well, there’s another difference between you and me. Since I don’t believe the landings were faked at all, any motive to the contrary is just about on equal footing. Are there a couple hundred poeple who might be laughing their butts off whenever a debunker says something in pulic? Sure, but it’s about as likely as that poor mouse living on the Sun.
[qupte]Doing it for money seems a bit strange; in the end, what profit was made off the moon?
[/quote]
Are you kidding? it kept thousands, if not millions, employed for years. The highest management was probably making more money then they could spend. The astronauts had enough to blow on Corvettes. The whole project was ‘pork’ for many. That guy making gaskets may not have known he was indirectly participating in a fraud, but he knew he was supporting his wife and kids.
The taxpayers be damned. There’s very little I can do to either support or deny funding to a highway beautification project 1,000 miles away from my home, paid for partially with my money. The people who “paid for” the Moon landings weren’t really the taxpayers, they were the politicians who decided for us where our tax money was spent.
Yes, wholly unsatifying if you don’t see your enemy crushed.
No, I didn’t mean they shrugged off the possibility, I meant they seem to have shrugged off the humiliation of not being first (or fourth or sixth) to land a man on the Moon. The Cold War raged on after we stopped going. The Soviet Union appears to have shrugged its collective shoulders (ha!) and said, in the end, “so what?”
You also wrote:
Well, no, because you’re not passing yourself off as a person who wishes to believe we didn’t land on the Moon. There are people out there who believe that we never set foot on the Moon, all evidence to the contrary be damned.
The position of the camera tells me that the rover was located close enough for dust and other particles to be blown into the camera, this is likely the stuff that we see surrounding the LM, in other words, the dust and other particles are “surrounding” (hitting) the camera NOT the LM.
It looks to me that NASA learned the lesson and put the Rover a little more farther away in the Apollo 17 mission, the result was a better liftoff sequence.
As for the shadows:
Finally! He sees the point! What you are demanding from this discussion you will not get. You are demanding a definitive answer for a rambling series of evolving and nit-picking questions, with the expectation that failure to explain every single one to your satisfaction is fair proof of a possible hoax.
My point is there are lots of things in life that there is no definitive answer to, or the definitive answer is a matter of debate (Hey! Isn’t this the Great Debate Forum?), or takes a whole lot more than a discussion thread in SD to resolve.
You won’t accept people’s explanations. You won’t accept that they may know more about it than you. You won’t go and embark on the required study and research to answer things yourself. Ergo; you are wasting your time.
Where was this article published, in some crackpot journal? And even if the complaint is legitimate, how do you or he know that the contamination did not occur until after the rocks were brought to Earth? Or is that merely what he was complaining about and the hoax believers stupidly think this is proof that the samples are fakes?
This doesn’t appear to have always been your position. As I’ve noted, you keep changing your proposition to distance yourself from the one allegation you keep alluding to.
You presented one possibility. It was absurd.
Well, let’s not unduly constrain ourselves. The period of aerosolization may be exceptionally brief. But the effect of the aerosolization – i.e., to impart the initial impulse for a potentially lengthy ballistic trajectory – may be profound in magnitude.
Displacement of dust particles is a response to aerodynamic loading, which is proportional, according to Bernoulli, to the density of the gas and the square of the velocity of the gas. Thus, a change in the velocity of the gas has a much more profound effect on the load than a change in its density. Consider that the sole purpose of a rocket engine is to expel gas at high velocity in as linear a direction as achievable. Exhaust gas velocity for some rocket engines approaches 10,000 meters per second.
Chamber pressure for an LM-sized rocket engine is about 100 pounds per square inch. Granted that temperature will influence this profundly, we note that this is an order of magnitude greater than air pressure at sea level. The nozzle expansion ratio will be on the order of 30:1. However, we cannot directly equate the chamber pressure to the pressure at the exit plane since “pressure” has no meaning in laminar or collinear flow. But density does, so as a first-order approximation we can presume that the density of the exhaust products at the exit plane will be on the order of 1/30 the chamber density, or 1/3 the average sea level atmospheric density. Assuming a 2X expansion of the radius of the exhaust cone with the LM at high altitude , the density can be estimated approximately 1/12 that of sea level atmosphere.
We note with some comfort that densities of this order sufficiently support large airliners, with slipstream velocities on the order of 200-300 meters per second. This is enough for the airliner’s airfoil to generate the necessary lift.
I submit, based on these crude approximations, that the impingement of these exhaust products is sufficient to displace dust particles on the lunar surface.
As confirmatory evidence I cite the concerted opinion of professional aerospace engineers that displaced dust on the moon has been a persistent design factor in producing spacecraft designed to soft-land on the lunar surface. Considerable effort was put toward being able to operate the lunar module where displaced dust might obscure the surface details.
I further submit the video of the Apollo 15 LM liftoff. The frame remains stationary in this footage. There is no tilt of the camera or change of focal length. The ascent stage rises to a point where the exhaust plume begins to directly impinge on the surface around the descent stage. This results in a partial obscuring of the frame which lasts only a couple of seconds until the ascent stage’s plume becomes too dispersed to affect the surface, at which point the frame clears completely. There was apparently little or no dust actually deposited on the lens. This confirms the density-based model and the shape of the exhaust plume as shown analytically.
I cannot make a conclusive case. But I can show that the numbers seem to add up, that the opinion of recognized experts is unified, and that allegedly documentary evidence fits the model.
If you wish to allege that the density of the exhaust products is insufficient to displace the dust on the lunar surface, I suggest you make an actual case for it and stop raising idle objections with no substance behind them.
I am obligated to point out that Dr. Keller made this comment in conjunction with a discussion of Space.com article and photograph. If that’s important to your understanding of his remarks, so be it. I feel it would be dishonest if I did not provide that context.
With all due respect to the Bad Astronomer, he’s an astronomer and I’m an aeronautical engineer. He is a bit out of his element talking about the very fine details of exhaust plume geometry. I, however, am in my element. The conical exhaust is not so much a “model” as it is a directly observed fact. It’s unfortunate that Aerozine 50 does not produce a very visible flame, otherwise we would be able to see it in the video. But other forms of hydrazine produce visible plumes, and we see them fire in space lots of times.
It’s not clear what he thinks. In any case, we can always ask. And in any case, what he thinks isn’t so important as what the actual physical phenomenon is.
I have a plausible mathematical justification, and established engineering principle, and some documentary evidence that argues in favor of exhaust impingement on the lunar surface and the resulting displacement of dust particles.
What have you got, except a bottomless bag of skepticism?
I almost hesitate to bring this up, but I consulted the Apollo News Reference for the lunar module. It specifies that a titanium blast deflector was provided under the ascent engine to route exhaust gases “out of and away from” the descent engine compartment in the center of the descent stage. Unfortunately neither this text description nor the accompanying drawings was sufficient to establish whether this shunted gas directly to the surface through the descent engine compartment, or whether it prevented exhaust gas from entering the compartment altogether.
The ANR also described layered ablative heat shields on the upper deck of the descent stage specifically to reject the heat loading of the ascent stage. By definition an ablative heat shield will flake away and vaporize under its heat load, so we must also consider the possibility that the visible cloud is at least partially composed of the vaporizing or fragmenting portions of the ablative heat shield.
If the exhaust gas passed through a shunt system or impinged first on the descent propulsion hardware, it would not necessary retain collinear flow.
Further, I do not characterize the visible dust behavior as “billows”. This is a rather important distinction for me.
No, I have concluded based on study and experience that the exhaust gas was sufficient in velocity and density to displace the dust particles visibly. It is not an assumption.
Yes, he bailed on the discussion some time ago, yet your treatment of the question continues to revolve around his statements, even though many others have been presented. Is your goal to find out what produced the effect you witnessed, or is your goal to trash Bad Astronomer as much as possible?
Yes, granted, but irrelevant. This particular point was made in reference to the “dog on the moon” analogy and how it affected the inductive process. My point was that many things can be known a priori by a reasonable reader, such as the impossibility of a dog’s survival on the moon, hence hypotheses which presume as much can be trivially rejected without investigation. Since all hypotheses that support the authenticity of such a photo require the viability of a dog on the moon as their premise, they can be categorically rejected.
This, where possible, constitutes an effective shortcut to the inductive process. The conclusion, while still inductive and therefore subject to inductive skepticism, is foregone. I concede that my use of the term “a priori” may have been inaccurate in this case. I meant simply to convey that it requires no special knowledge to determine that a dog bereft of oxygen cannot survive, and that oxygen is not to be found on the moon. True, a child cannot necessarily grasp this, but if we consider this the criterion for a priori understanding then a vast amount of induction would be required for entire classes of simple problems.
This is the basis of my contention that your “dog on the moon” analogy has nothing to do with the inductive process as applied here and in nearly all other cases. Because ignorance is relative, there exists a continuum of ignorance. Some problems are easy enough that failure to understand their solution constitutes evidence of mental dysfunction. This is the class of inductive problems which can circumvent the inductive process.
It appears, at long last, we can finally agree that your “dog on the moon” analogy has no material bearing on the inductive process you have pursued so far in your investigation.
This may be simplistic. I agree with it in general, but this is the dynamic of a collinear, or very nearly collinear, stream of gas impinging on a perpendicular solid plane. The dispersal pattern will emphasize radial motion at or near the plane with little initial dispersal perpendicular to the plane. I say “initial” dispersal because I believe the ability to displace dust particles is not present after the gas flow becomes chaotic.
It thus has greater application for the descent engine than for the ascent engine. The ascent plume presents a more complicated dynamic because it does not necessarily directly impinge on the planar surface unmolested. Depending on the design of the shunt above the descent engine compartment, the initial gas dynamic may not be that of a conical column of collinear gas. And at high altitude where the shunt is insgnificant, the descent stage itself would serve to perturb the gas flow.
The precise effect of these perturbations on the exhaust flow cannot be conclusively determined. Based on Bernoulli’s observation that velocity, not density, is the prime effect, I tend to believe the exhaut products would pass through various mechanical perturbations with enough potential to displace lunar surface materials.
The trajectory of dust particles will be probabilistic in any case. While the vast majority, say 90%, may be trapped in the aerosol effect and follow flat trajectories, 10% may bounce off a rock, a landing strut, a piece of discarded hardware, and thus exit the aerosol effect on trajectories to carry them high above the flat level of the strict aersol/ballistic trajectory.
Even within the aerosol path there will be probabilistic particle densities. The aerosol dispersal pattern may dictate that some high percentage of the particles will lie within a certain volume close to the surface.
I say this because we must consider lighting and view angles.
In the departure footage, small amounts of on improbable trajectories will be more visible. The camera is at waist level and so looks up. The sun is behind the camera. This means that any small amount of dust which occurs higher than waist level will be especially visible against the black sky.
In the descent footage the background is the lunar surface. It would be impossible to tell from film alone if any dust occurred at improbable trajectories because it would be lost in the pronounced sheeting action visible close to the surface. It would also occur largely in the shadow of the lunar module and be unlit.
This is wide open to interpretation. By “exhaust” do you mean the nozzle, or the exhaust gas plume?
“Suspended” has the potential to mislead. I mean that the fluid dynamics of the exhaust will provide impulses guaranteed to render the force of gravity insignificant on dust particles. The duration and physical extent of this phenomenon is inconclusive, but the resulting ballistic effects are on the order of 100 meters.
Dust on earth can remain suspended for several minutes. This effect would not be observed on the lunar surface. The “hang time” for particles disturbed in the Apollo 15 LM liftoff is less than three seconds.
No, the model is verifiable through several disciplines. Upon what basis do you challenge it?
No. You may choose either to take it on faith or to educate yourself to the level of knowledge required to evaluate the strength of the technical argument on its merits. To question it from a position of relative ignorance is ludicrous, yet this is what you have proposed to do. If the principles cannot be sufficiently explained to you in terms you accept and understand, you start looking at absurd alternatives.
As you are so fond of emphasizing, you do not represent the common case. As I’ve already explained, there is little in initial outward appearance that distinguishes you from the common case, and that’s why people don’t take you seriously.
Exactly. You are no doubt aware that any answer would tend to dignify the questions, which in most cases are logically and scientifically absurd. The conspiracy theory does not enjoy much credibility, so NASA does not have much to gain by dealing with the questions it raises. And the proponents of the theories are not swayed by NASA’s answers, no matter how thoughful or correct. Since these people are predisposed to think NASA has lied and will continue to lie, anything NASA might say in its own defense will simply be dismissed as further deception.
Clearly the only appropriate course of action is to keep silent.
You may believe your situation differs markedly from these “whackos” but it really doesn’t. Although you hold no specific conclusion regarding falsification, you seem to approach the question predisposed to believe NASA has lied.
Further, you seem to ascribe to NASA some kind of primary educational role. It is not NASA’s duty to turn all its supplicants into rocket scientists. NASA’s job is to plan, regulate, and carry out the nation’s space program. This includes, but is not confined to, an educational mission.
I don’t require NASA to educate me about how Apollo works. There are many fine sources.
Rather, NASA most likely works in a way other than you believe it should. Deal with it.
Nor can I. You seem to want to dismiss all debunkers because one debunker is wrong or misleading, or because debunkers sometimes fail to agree. Bad Astronomer has been gone for several days, yet you keep harping on what he says. If he’s an arrogant ass, so be it. That’s his problem, and his arguments are his. He doesn’t need my defense, and I am at present disinclined to offer it.
You applauded Irishman for his suggestion that we leave off the meta-debate and concentrate on the facts surrounding your questions. I have provided to you what amounts to a crash course in fluid dynamics and rocket engine design so that you might better understand what’s happening here. Yet your tone doesn’t change. You respond to every explanation with, essentially, “prove it.” From my point of view, you refuse to take expert opinion on faith and you refuse to be educated. What is to be done? What other possibilities exist?
You can either take what someone says on faith with the understanding that you don’t know how right it is, or you can go down to the library or the college and educate yourself to the level of expertise required to debate specialized arguments on their merits. It is tedious for you to demand thorough answers and then receive them contentiously. You’re either here to debate, in which case you are expected to have sufficiently educated yourself already, or you are here to be educated, in which case it behooves you to desist challenging every tenet.
So if the fanatics ask questions and look askance at the answers, but you ask the same questions and look similarly askance at the answers, how shall we distinguish you? And when you’re awfully excited about what you perceive to be confusion and contradiction in your interlocutors, even when that confusion could be due to common misunderstanding or differences of interpretation, it does not bode well for your motives.
Perhaps. Both are examples of improper induction. If I’ve contributed to any confusion, I apologize.
If you wish to make such a case, go ahead.
No still photographs exist of the dust displacement of the type that would be produced by an exhaust plume because no such photographic equipment was employed, or able to be employed, during the time at which that propulsion was in operation.
16mm film exists of the descent, but we have already examined the limitations of lighting and view angle which convolve to make observation of dust displacement ambiguous.
There is videotape of the ascent of various lunar modules, which provides images consistent with the displacement of dust by exhaust gas according to the model I have explained.
Now upon what basis do you challenge the models I have put forward? I am willing to be corrected, but I am not willing to be simply gainsaid.
Among other things:
A systematic examination of all lunar EVA photographs, with special attention paid to those identified by conspiracy theorists as anomalous.
An ongoing examination of all available lunar EVA motion pictures, with emphasis as above.
Submission of allegedly anomalous photographs to experts in photography, lighting, physics, and other relevant fields to determine what may have caused alleged anomalies.
The computation of numerical models involving propulsion, orbit, mass, payload, and navigation relating to the published mission plans.
Inspection of Apollo hardware (spacecraft, spacesuits, tools, etc.) with the permission of the owners to verify the plausibility of documented operation.
Discussions and debates with engineers who worked on the Apollo project and can provide lots of necessary background informaton.
Fine and dandy, but you haven’t provided any examples of anything impossible by this definition, and anomalies themselves demonstrate nothing. The premise that a true event must leave behind a record devoid of anomaly is one I cannot agree to. You want all the anomalies explained, and I want to know why you expect that this is necessary or even possible.
But why is it material? A knowledge of photography and exposure obviates this point. A consultation of the available Apollo flight plans confirms this.
Again, your allusion to falsification still stands without justification. Before it becomes plausible to consider that NASA falsified the Apollo records, it first falls to you to demonstrate why NASA would need or want to falsify them.
Hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds, plus unburnt propellants during the ignition transient. I’ve given estimates above of the physical properties of the exhaust.
For those who may not wish to read the entire article, here are some salient points.
BickByro’s statement that the researcher in question has found contamination in “every sample he’s examined” is somewhat misleading. The author’s statement is
“Steele looked at a cross-section of lunar samples known to be contaminated, as well as a pristine core of lunar regolith brought back by Apollo 15 astronauts. … All of the specimens inspected by Steele, including a core sample, show evidence of contamination, mostly by plastics …”
The researcher Andrew Steele is intentionally working with samples known to be contaminated. The implication that all the lunar samples are contaminated is false. Steele is quoted as saying, “My hat is off to them [the curators]. They’ve done a brilliant job.” The level of contamination is not considered serious or compromisory.
The nature of the contamination is important. The article lists the prime contaminants as brush bristles, plastic, nylon, and Teflon. In other words they are materials involved with the collection and transportation of the samples by the astronauts. If you put a rock in a plastic bag, the rock will scrape off some of the plastic. There is not much you can do to stop this. If you drive an aluminum tube into the surface, some of the aluminum will scrape off. You can’t avoid this.
The article mentions only one biological contaminant: earthly organisms propagating on a few samples. The Surveyor spacecraft established that earth organisms can survive in a lunar environment, so we are clearly seeing forward contamination in the sample chain. Unfortunate, but not apparently a big deal.
Although the researchers have not established the exact method of contamination, it appears clear that the contamination is of the nature commonly problematic in sciences which rely on the collection of physical specimens. You cannot obtain, package, transport, or prepare samples without using tools or substances which may contaminate the sample.
The hypothesis that the lunar samples are contaminated as a result of falsification or fabrication on earth is not supported in the least by the data in this article.
Well, I hope everybody had a fun weekend and Monday… And sorry about the italics in the last post; I was in quite a hurry.
So, let’s see… First, let me address JayUtah. I would like to thank you for you contributions regarding the effects of exhaust gas on lunar dust; since my last post, I’ve seen you get very specific with the details, and that’s what I was looking for. I didn’t have time to respond to your post on 9-28 at 6:44 p.m., so that may have given you the impression I was dismissing your points. On the contrary, I’m certainly not interested in attempting to disprove your calculations; you obviously know more about this than I do. I only wish you would have put up all that information earlier rather than expending so much effort attempting to convince me that I’ve fallen prey to circular reasoning (which I still maintain I haven’t, by the way). It sure would have cleared things up faster.
From here on out (and I know I’ve said this before, but…) I’m going to try to shy away from any more discussion on what NASA’s motives might have been had they faked some or all of the Apollo missions. That’s all just far too hypothetical and too likely to incur the wrath of the SDMB.
However, thanks for posting up this detail, JayUtah: “Sun angles varied from 13 degrees to 45 degrees.” Good to know.
Invisible due to dust blowing around? Seriously? Do you realize how starkly that image stands in contrast to the one painted by the debunkers (and it’s not just The Bad Astronomer I’m talking about this time). I’m not saying you’re wrong (as you know, I’m always ready to accept that the debunkers may be wrong), but damn, that’s just incredible!
The only nitpick I do have with your explanation of the exhaust/dust effect is that the ascent stage doesn’t look fifty feet off the ground at the time the “dust cloud” becomes visible. But I’m not the best at judging distance; who knows. One thing I don’t quite understand (and that has no bearing on whether your points are correct, BTW) is why the descent engine (throttled down to 3,000 lbs.) was so much stronger than the ascent engine (fixed at 3,500 lbs.). Wouldn’t you need more thrust to get yourself into orbit?
Well, hell, it would be exciting to uncover such a hoax, I’m not gonna lie to you. But I have no guarantee that’s going to happen.
Okay, from those of you who take exception to the title I gave this thread, I’d like to hear some suggestions that wouldn’t have gotten your dander up. If I had titled it “Apparent Anomalies/Inconsistencies/Impossibilities in the Apollo Photo/Footage Record,” do you really think anybody would have been “fooled” into thinking the Moon Hoax was not under consideration here? Also consider that any Doper with sufficient curiosity could have learned quite quickly that I participated in a previous Moon Hoax thread (hell, I even mention it in my OP), so I doubt I would have been able to “hide” for very long. I just figured I’d put the topic up there (because, whether I’m driving toward any conclusions or not, that is the topic) and hope that the blanket hoax-haters would restrain themselves. But if you folks think that I could have avoided some of this with a better thread title, well, let’s hear it!
Next up was DaveW: I like the Atari analogy—now that’s some equipment I’m familiar with!
I’m guessing you disagree with the assessment that all the LEM’s apparent trajectory-shifts were due to the camera?
Well, yes, I understand that—I didn’t mean “in a vacuum” in the sense of not considering anything outside the example at hand, but rather that we don’t need to consider all the NASA evidence at once. I say, take a single piece of NASA evidence and run through all the disciplines necessary to prove/disprove it, then move on to the next piece of NASA evidence (and chances are, there’ll be some info from the last example you’ll be able to carry over into the next one).
Well, if the hoax questions are really so stupid as to not be worth dignifying with a response, I doubt any honest-to-God experts have spent much time considering the merits of the conspiratorial theories.
To a certain extent, of course, this is inevitable. Obviously there was some “rocket science” involved. I’d just like to get as close as I can to knowing what’s up without having to actually master all the disciplines involved. Isn’t that the whole point of the Straight Dope?
I think even Kaysing argues that NASA put the astronauts on the rockets and launched them, but only into earth orbit—not to the moon.
As for the continuing mound/pit debate, I still (even using your 1/4-moon analogy) cannot visualize the processes necessary to create a mound which just so happens to look exactly like a crater with its colors reversed, with a central pit surrounded by an ejecta ring. Escher ain’t helping either. Sorry; I just don’t see it. Perhaps we need to pinpoint some specific crater/mound-things in the photos and compare them.
Along the same lines, it’s not that I’m out-to-doubt when it comes to the direction that rock photo was taken from; it’s just that I can’t reconcile this pit/mound thing and I still see craters when I reverse your image. And, other than the gopher humor, I still don’t see where all these lunar mounds would have come from.
Yeah, but it’s interesting nonetheless!
This is just fascinating! I have absolutely no relevant comments, either!
I wonder what I did wrong… well, okay, I’ll get over to that site in a bit. I don’t suppose you were able to settle the whole “is it UV or a regular B&W” issue while you were over there?
So I’m getting a bit lost here. The space.com photo, you say, is definitely not centered on the landing site. Does that mean the photo you provided (with Hadley Rille prominent) is not centered on the landing site either? I had originally proposed that we were looking at photos of two different areas and this proposal got rejected—is it being accepted now?
I’m guessing option 1 is the preferred choice here…
Well, I did my best!
Har har. Like I said above, I don’t think there’s a title I could have picked that wouldn’t have led to this…
Well, I obviously believe you now that you’ve negated the image. What I still can’t believe is that you don’t see how much more REAL the craters look (ie they actually look like craters at all) when the colors are reversed.
Well, I’ve got a whole bunch of links to check out still (didn’t even touch the SDMB this weekend), but it looks like the rate of response to my posts has decreased sufficiently for me to pursue them more. I appreciate everything you’ve done and are doing; I hope you don’t think I’m just using you as my “information bitch” (or “Mr. Answer,” if you prefer).
The points you’ve brought up in this post are definitely of value, whether or not they settle anything. It gets more interesting all the time!
I don’t see why they would have accepted defeat so easily. But hey, I’m sure the information’s out there somewhere…
GIGObuster: Thanks again; I’ll get on all that stuff ASAP. I’m rushing to finish this all before lunch…
Futile Gesture: I’ve had enough of your “insight.” Obviously, my questions are answerable, or people like DaveW and GIGObuster and even (now) JayUtah wouldn’t be answering them. As Great Debates go, the answers here are comparatively easy to find (I can’t imagine what it’s like arguing with you in a “does God exist” thread). But if you don’t want to participate in this thread, don’t. I’m certainly not forcing you.
Of course the contamination could have taken place on Earth. But then again, how can you tell?
Back to JayUtah: I hope your saltiness in this post is due to the fact that I hadn’t responded to your last one.
Well, gee, now that you finally got into some specific details instead of just “your argument is circular, therefore NASA landed on the moon,” my objections become “idle.” Where the hell were you four or five days ago?
Fine, and I believe you. I still say you could have presented this evidence long ago.
A little of both, frankly.
Whatever it takes to get you to tackle specific issues, as per my OP.
None, now that you’ve presented it in a specific form instead of just throwing it out there as “the answer.” See how easy that was?
I’d accept this argument if NASA hadn’t gone to such lengths to disprove the Face on Mars. If that question is dignified enough for an answer, so are mine, dammit!
Well, that’s what you do to hoax believers, isn’t it? In any case, I’m sure not all debunkers are as hubristic as the ol’ BA.
Again, I think perhaps the fact that I didn’t respond to you immediately may have misled you. I find your explanation incredibly in-depth and exactly what I’ve been looking for. Perhaps you should forward it in an e-mail to The Bad Astronomer so he can correct yet another factual error he’s made on his Web site…
I like to stick up for the underdog. Debunkers get the benefit of the doubt in these discussions, and I think that benefit often goes too far.
I am quite impressed, by the way, that your investigation included
It sounds like you might have had some doubt of your own, at one point in time, if you actually went through the effort of inspecting the hardware. How’d you get “permission of the owners”?
Look: you’ve demonstrated that “dust clouds” on the moon are possible in certain situations, right? Supposing such an argument did not exist. Suppose dust clouds were absolutely impossible on the moon. Then we’d be in a much different position, right?
And, finally, to your points on the moon rock article…
Well, now, that’s a bit misleading. He’s working with some samples known to be contaminated, but he’s also working with a pristine core sample that isn’t supposed to be contaminated.
That’s just your interpretation, as far as I can tell.
Sure. But he did seem surprised to find even the “pristine core” contaminated, and he does have faith that other samples will come to light that have not been contaminated.
I wasn’t citing it as a supporting point for an argument, just an interesting little aside. Obviously, the article is far from conclusive.
Except that they didn’t, you know. Not in any way, shape or form. The first photos purporting to show a “face” in the Cydonia region of Mars were taken by a Viking probe in July of 1976. The next photos of any consequence were taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, which was launched 20 years later. And there was no guarantee that they would even get any pictures; as NASA’s press release announcing the imaging stated, “The sites will be visible about once every eight days, and we’ll have a 30- to- 50-percent chance of capturing images of the sites each time.”
If that qualifies as “going to lengths,” I’d like to know what qualifies as “ignoring a bunch of loonies.” I’ll tell you what, though–you send an e-mail off to NASA today with your list of demands, and get back to us in 20 years. That will give them the opportunity to go to exactly the same lengths. You let us all know what happens, OK?
So easy you can’t find them yourself? You need to make your mind up; do you want a debate, or answers? Not so much of a debate as an never-ending examination, isn’t it? Forgive me for thinking that you’re not so much interested in the facts, or even the science, but more in the chance to catch people out and declare it ‘proof’.
Bick, Bick, Bick, … Since I did look for the answers to your questions I did notice that while you thanked me, the fact is that you did not reply at all to the implied conclusions that follow the examination of the evidence presented. Namely that your conclusions are wrong. You are just argumenting with the others for argument’s sake. You are walking on air just like Elmer Fudd after Bugs Bunny. The problem is that by your own words you say that your questions can be answered. Others and I did, so please acknowledge the ground already! Otherwise you risk turning into a sucker like Elmer.
One final note:
The real curious thing about the “shadows” film of Apollo 14 was that MTV used that clip for one of the original MTV promo clips (the American flag was replaced with the MTV one). The sad thing is that some people think that the launch of MTV was more important than the landings on the Moon.
I am not part of this debate, but I felt a disclaimer was in order. The site you linked to has nothing in common with my site, nor does the evidence I present have anything to do with anomaly hunters. The serious discrepancies I point out in Apollo photos can be called “long range anomalies”, but the fact remains they are serious discrepancies. They are definate proof that the Apollo photos were faked. I would call that very serious.
I noticed someone talking about the Mars Cydonia Face. There is a huge sculpture of a man and a bird-like creature on the side of the Cydonia Face, and I have cropped and colorized it at my site. It’s in the very last folder on the page. Again, it looks like NASA is either wrong, or is lying about the artificiality of the Cydonia Face.
pldennison: They may have only had a 30- to 50-percent chance of capturing images of the “Mars Face” on each orbit, but they were trying to capture it, were they not? They seem to have succeeded, in any case, and I remember the new photos being pretty big news when they were released. Perhaps NASA could have gone to greater lengths, but in that particular case sending up a satellite specifically to photograph The Face would have been about all the more they could do. On the other hand, how difficult would it be for NASA to officially explain away at least some of the Moon Hoax issues?
Futile Gesture: I don’t need to make my mind up whether I want a debate or answers, because I’ve wanted answers this whole time. The thread got moved to Great Debates. I still think tangible, satisfactory answers are out there somewhere, and I’ve already gotten a lot of them out of this thread. I don’t see what the problem is here.
GIGObuster: Sorry, I didn’t “Do the Dope” all weekend and most of the time I’ve spent on the SDMB at work has been used for replying rather than pursuing links. There’s no need to get testy; I’ll get to your links in good time. In fact, since no one else seems to have responded today, perhaps I’ll do a bit of that presently…
Then can we agree that the dust behavior visible in the various motion picture records of lunar landing and liftoff is plausible given an appropriate understanding of the fluid dynamics of rocket exhaust? And can we therefore conclude that said records are not anomalous in the context of physical law?
The only way to do that is to shy away from concluding, appearing to conclude, mentioning as a possibility, or generally alluding to the hypothesis that NASA falsified the lunar landings or records to them. Any hypothesis suggesting that NASA falsified its records has a premise that NASA needed or wanted to do so. Thus prima facie support of such a hypothesis (i.e., even to consider it a viable possibility) must provide that alleged motive.
It’s not a matter of incurring wrath. It’s a matter of presenting an argument that makes sense.
You’re welcome. It’s public knowledge. You could have found this out yourself with only a few minutes’ research.
No, it does not contrast with any viewpoint I’ve seen expressed by a serious “debunker”. You insist on using general, imprecise language when discussing the displacement of dust due to rocket exhaust. You have so far resisted my efforts to bring precise terminology and detailed descriptions to this discussion, preferring instead to fall back on phrases such as “dust blowing around,” which I do not agree with. If you wish to avoid the impression that you’re here just to see if you can create dissent or confusion among debunkers, I suggest you start looking for ways to homogenize, not polarize, the various answers given to your questions.
Both NASA and the designers of the lunar module (Grumman) understood what was going to happen to the dust on the lunar surface during the descent. After understanding what instruments would be available and what visual cues the astronauts would likely want from looking out the window, Grumman agreed to the specification that the lunar module would be able to fly the last 100 feet of the descent strictly on instruments.
The instruments in question are the “eight ball” (a sort of artificial horizon linked to the gyroscopic guidance platform), the lateral drift indicator, the radar altimeter, and the sink rate indicator.
It was understood that the astronaut piloting the lunar module would want to use the ground for attitude and altitude information. The sheeting action proximal to the lunar module would obscure surface detail and make fine altitude visualization difficult. It is difficult to focus on the location of a sheet of dust.
It does not take much vertical dispersion to obscure the horizon or render it ambiguous. Thus it was deemed insufficient for the astronaut to use the visual horizon as an attitude reference during the final landing phase.
These effects seem consistent with my recollection of Bad Astronomer’s DPS plume description, and with Dr. John Keller’s model of the dust dispersal range.
I chose fifty feet as an arbitrary altitude. The point is that the plume expands in a conical fashion, the extent of which cannot be analytically determined exactly.
The descent engine has a maximum thrust of just under 10,000 pounds. Recall that any spacecraft is a variable-mass vehicle. As you burn propellant, the spacecraft mass decreases and the available acceleration increases. So you plan your powerplant for a full (heavy) rocket, not a light one. Propellant accounts for the vast majority of the weight in many spacecraft, including the lunar module.
At terminal landing phase, the lunar module had shed something like 17,000 (earth) pounds of propellant burned during the descent (a guess; I have exact figures for each mission if necessary). The full power of the DPS was needed in the early landing phases to effect orbital maneuvers – i.e., to transition from the descent orbit to the landing orbit. This was done when the LM was loaded down with fuel. Precision in orbital maneuvers is often a factor of how quickly you can execute changes in delta-v.
Here’s the analogy I use all the time.
Imagine that you’re driving along a crowded freeway. You want to merge into the lane next to you, but it’s travelling considerably faster than you. There’s an opening coming up behind you in that lane. You can’t speed up in your lane to match the speed of your destination lane; you would rear-end the car in front of you. As the opening draws abreast of you, you steer into that slot and then slam your accelerator to the floor because you don’t want be rear-ended by the car behind you. You want to very quickly come up to the speed of the lane you’re now in. Clearly a powerful engine would be a boon here.
Consider also one of the several LM abort modes. Should something happen, the crew may wish to use the massive thrust of the descent motor to arrest their downward motion and regain orbit. If they are falling rapidly, the ascent motor might not be able to reverse their descent before impact.
3,000 pounds thrust is sufficient to gently set the combined lunar module down. When the ascent stage separates, 3,500 pounds thrust is enough to hurl that much lighter craft into orbit.
How about “Questions About the Apollo Photos and Film”?
You’ve got to choose. Either you phrase your title so as to predispose your audience and attract people who might get the wrong idea about your motives, or you phrase it neutrally and hope people notice it.
A fixed-thrust rocket propelling a diminishing-mass spacecraft will accelerate at a rate that increases over time.
The ascent engine was not gimballed, therefore attitude corrections were made with RCS. This would have caused the spacecraft to exhibit “sidewinder” oscillation in its flight path.
The ascent guidance system was programmed to start pitching the ascent stage into its insertion trajectory only a few seconds after liftoff.
I think it would be impossible to conclusively distinguish the source of the apparent motion of the ascent stage in the television frame, whether it’s camera motion or spacecraft motion.
Agreed. I have said on numerous occasions that it’s not really possible to analytically determine everything that might happen in the exhaust plume, especially on the ascent. This dooms to failure any argument based on the notion that what is seen cannot be explained naturally, therefore must have been falsified.
It doesn’t take much expertise to reject the vast majority of the conspiracy theories. Would it take the staff of the Mayo Clinic to reject a theory that infection is caused by space aliens’ invisible ray beams and not by microbes?
So what do you plan to do when your appetite for education is exhausted, but your questions remain unanswered?
I disagree. I get messages all the time from people I’ve never met asking questions about the lunar landings. Most are phrased neutrally and elicit from me a cordial and factually centered response.
I don’t care how long it takes for you to respond, or if you respond at all. The saltiness derives from your trend of idly contending every hypothesis that favors the authenticity of the Apollo record, and the general slipperiness of your contributions. You seem to favor making statments from which you can readily back away as soon as discomfort arises. If it’s possible to be assertive in tentativity, you have certainly achieved it.
Normally in historical circles evidence is assumed to be authentic unless a strong positive case can be made for its falsification. Yet you seem to believe it’s false until proven authentic.
This was never my argument. I noted that one isolated statement you made was circular, but not that this circularity proved NASA’s claims for Apollo. My extended remarks on the remainder of your argument, over which I believe we have resolved the confusion over circularity, detailed the failure of your inductive case on other grounds, that of impropertly affirming the consquent.
I assert that your objections are idle on the grounds that you challenge them without providing any insight on why you distrust them. This conveys the impression of being contrary for the sake of contrariness.
Long ago your argument was wallowing the mire of improperly constructed induction. Evidence is largely irrelevant at that point, and I chose to address my remarks to the structural flaws of your line of reasoning. Now that we have achieved parity on the nature of your argument, I have turned my attention to its specific points.
I’m not the least interested in whatever vendetta you have against Bad Astronomer. If you wish to focus on your questions, I will answer them as best I can.
I have never considered the dog analogy relevant to this discussion. You are the one who invoked it to defend the formulation of your induction. More than once, I might add. It seems odd for you to accuse me of having perpetuated it in this thread.
No, it was not easy. I’m the one who had to do the research, computation, typing, and the redaction of complicated concepts into simple terms. You had the easy role, which was simply to repeat, “That’s not conclusive, prove it.”
As I said, you may choose to accept what I say on faith. Or you may choose to educate yourself to the point of either confirming or contradicting what I say. But if you plan to gainsay everything until I lay it meticulously at your feet, you may find my patience exhausted.
You presume these questions are of a similar nature and applicability. I do not.
“You” meaning whom? I daresay you’ve never seen me personally interact with hoax believers (which I have done extensively). And any other connotation of “you” bespeaks your continued intent to lump all debunkers into a single group for convenient dismissal. Sorry, but your tu quoque is showing.
Why then do you expend so much attention toward the hubristic debunkers, even after they’ve departed the field? Your goal to cut the debunkers down to size doesn’t seem compatible with your goal to understand the nature of the Apollo record.
Not really. Cursory responses are a fact of life in this type of debate. But your cursory response was, in essence, “prove it,” when a better response might have been, “interesting; I’ll have some more comments later.”
I’m still not convinced his site is factually flawed. I believe instead it’s ambiguous enough to allow for misleading interpretation or misapplication. (I.e., discussions about the descent plume’s interaction do not necessary transfer unaltered to the ascent plume.) Nevertheless your suggestion is quite in order, and I will do so. B.A. and I sporadically exchange expertise.
Who do you believe is the underdog here? Are you speaking on behalf of someone else, or are these your personal questions?
I disagree. Lunar landing hoax theories appeal to members of the public because they employ intuitive arguments that appeal to common understanding that is often simplistic or outright wrong. It is very easy to formulate a hoax theory because it does not require any special knowledge of difficult aerospace concepts.
Explaining the true principles of space flight as employed by Apollo, and the true principles of photography, physics, and other detailed sciences, requires explaining to the interlocutors and audience the messy details of engineering and other sciences that an audience might not be disposed or equipped to understand. There’s a reason rocket science is the paragon of difficulty.
Second, hoax enthusiasts need only contemplate what might have been, not what actually was. You can produce a hoax theory with no more resources at hand than an armchair and an afternoon. This is infinitely easier than the debunker’s challenge to determine what actually was. That involves painstaking research and the acquisition of obscure and detailed knowledge.
Finally, the conspiracist nearly always gets to frame the debate, meaning that debunker is inappropriately assigned the burden of proof. Were these conspiracy theories placed in the arena of unsympathetic examination, they would be summarily dismissed as unsupported.
Inductive skepticism, perhaps. I don’t need the opinions of these experts to support my belief in Apollo. As I said, I have no delusion of being able to satisfactorily explain all that might be considered anomalous in the Apollo record. But I don’t require a full explanation in order to conclude that Apollo succeeded in landing on the moon. That’s the nature of induction.
But to make a public case, one needs the opinions of experts when one’s own expertise falls short. If someone says that the lighting in a particular photograph is suspicious, I don’t have to believe them or doubt the authenticity of the photograph. But if I want to understand the accusation and perhaps answer it for others, I need to know more. It’s not sufficient to say, “Yes, but I believe it’s still a valid photograph.” I need to be able to say, “No, that’s how light is supposed to behave, and here’s why.”
When I made the transition from understanding Apollo for myself to explaining Apollo to others, I felt the need to thoroughly investigate the record. As I said, I am (or was) an engineer. I don’t take chances. Engineers are trained to have as many ducks in a row as possible.
As I said, I used to be an aerospace engineer. My professional mentors are Apollo veterans and have provided items from their personal collections (e.g., DSKYs from the computers) or have greased wheels with museum curators and professionals.
I volunteer at the local planetarium. They have an Apollo EMU in a display case, and I am occasionally permitted to examine it closely as payment for my services at the planetarium. They have other space hardware too, which I can examine.
This involvement, for example, led to a phone call to the curator of the San Diego aerospace museum and an opportunity to photograph Neil Armstrong’s training space suit in a way not normally available to visitors.
One opportunity leads to another.
Right, but irrelevant. You keep referring to this hypothetical special case of pseudo-inductive certainty which has nothing whatsoever to do with your case.
You never knew that dust clouds were impossible on the moon. You simply chose to believe your interpretation of one statement that indicated as such. Since belief in the statement depends on one’s expertise with the relevant field, we’re clearly considering normal induction here. Personal belief is not inductive strength.
Yes, agreed. However, you failed to specify the nature of the research. Someone reading your statement could erroneously conclude that the researcher was examining the samples for another purpose and was frustrated to find them all contaminated. It’s far more accurate to point out that the researcher was intentionally studying the nature and extent of the contamination. If a researcher “accidentally” discovers widespread contamination, this suggests contamination is a serious problem. If a researcher is specifically seeking out and studying material he knows to be contaminated in order to understand the nature of the contamination, the implication is less severe.
It is indeed alarming to discover contamination in pristine samples. But the nature of the contamination (e.g., by-products of collection and transportation) suggests that samples expected to be uncontaminated will be so contaminated. I expect we have to read Steele’s full paper in order to draw quantitative conclusions.
Granted, but is my interpretation supportable?
Jack Schmitt notes that people expecting to study the composition of lunar samples must be assured their samples are not contaminated with anything. This is obvious.
But not all study of lunar materials requires this. Steele notes that not much more could have been done to safeguard the purity of the lunar samples. Contamination is unavoidable in sample collection. Therefore the sciences that rely on collected samples must develop methods to account for and factor out contamination. They cannot simply sit idle waiting for absolutely pure material. Thus when I claim that contamination does not compromise the value of the lunar material, I mean that the sciences dealing with lunar material can be expected to account for contamination and carry on.
No, that statement is not in the article. Steele’s alarm may refer to the deplorable state of some of the most contaminated samples.
Once I understood the nature of the contamination, I wasn’t surprised to learn that a pristine sample was contaminated. The contamination seems to derive from the materials used to obtain and store the specimens, so I conclude any sample which was obtained and stored (i.e., all of them) has the potential for contamination.
No, I’m not buying this backpedalling. You’re again walking right up to the brink of a conclusion and then backing away from it as soon as someone bites. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Jab1 said, “Anyway, we can prove we went to the Moon with our rocks and soil samples. None of the geologists who studied the rocks believe they are Earth rocks or man-made fakes.” You responded directly to that point with an allusion to this article which, according to your summary, says the lunar material is contaminated with earth material. Why would any reasonable person conclude you did this not intending to make a relevant argument?
You didn’t provide a link or a citation to the article, ensuring that not many people would actually go find it and read it. When I scrounged up the article and read it, I found that the “contamination” did not impeach the authenticity of the material at all, merely questioned its continuing value to scientists who rely on pure samples.
In the context of an argument over lunar material as proof of the authenticity of the landings, you allude to an article allegedly discussing the discovery of earthly contaminants, summarize it ambiguously, and disguise its source. And you expect me to believe this “tidbit” was just provided out of random general interest and wasn’t intended to address the point to which it was attached?
You almost had me convinced that you really were looking for honest answers and not really making a case. How can you expect to be taken seriously when you pull stunts like this?
I suppose now I’m going to be again subjected to the harangue wherein you profess that you were making no specific argument and if I got that impression then it’s my own fault. If you want us to take you seriously and answer your questions, then stop yanking our collective chain.
). Push up, the camera goes up. Push left, it goes left. But, push the joystick up and left at the same time, and both motors go, producing a 45-degree up-and-left motion for the camera. So, Fendell was pushing the joystick down and left, making the LM appear to go up and right. He pushes the joystick so that it’s only going down, and gets the straight-up LM motion. And then hard left to get the straight-right motion (and now that I think about it, if the LM were drifting down, that would explain the slight re-acquisition in the corner).