The Dark Side of the Moon.

[Penguin]

Theres also an Asimov short story where people go to Mars after devastating Earth ecologically. On Mars, they find, what else but the remains of the civilization that had devastated Mars and gone to Earth for survival

I don't remember that one. Do you recall a title?

No, and it is possible Im mixing him with some other author like Jack Vance.
Ill check my bookcase tomorrow if I remember.

[stickdog99]

So where are those photos? The article is from 2005.

Ahem.
What did I just say about using the search on the intertubes?

Perhaps, the official site for SMART-1? Maybe?

http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?missi ... T-1&type=I

Not to be snarky or anything.

Of the Apollo landing sites?

[OP ED]

No? Google "moon probe"...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21773401/

Wow! Japan’s moon probe updates Earthrise
High-definition camera sends back reprise of famous Apollo-era photos

A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earthrise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging.

The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has been orbiting 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon since Oct. 18.

The new Earthrise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. Released on Tuesday, it is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television camera.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

A second image, taken from a different location in the lunar orbit, has been dubbed "Earthset." A related series of still images shows our planet setting beyond the lunar horizon.
(the pic link was so long I didnt copy it)

And thats not the only link that comes up...

The USA has not made a soft landing on the Moon -- manned or unmanned -- in over 35 years. Why not? What are we afraid of (not) finding there?

Nothing.

Why should they spend billions of dollars to take more pictures for you to complain about?

what would be the point?
couldn't you just claim those photos were fake too?

jesus.

[Ben D]

This stuff is a bit dated, but here are some of the plans for a return to the moon but this time permanently. Also there are newcomers ready to establish lunar bases.

NASA Makes Plans for Permanent Moon Base
Published: December 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — NASA announced plans today for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

Russia to set up manned lunar base
2 Sep 2007, 0451 hrs IST, AGENCIES
MOSCOW: Russia plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent manned base there in 2027-2032, the head of the space agency said on Friday.

The moon - a gigantic leap for the Chinese who spy a business opportunity in space
Beijing takes giant leap into space with plans for lunar station.

Japan Planning Manned Lunar Base Within 20 Years
01 March 2005
Officials with Japan's space agency say they are making plans establish a manned lunar base by 2025.

[stickdog99]

No? Google "moon probe"...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21773401/

Wow! Japan’s moon probe updates Earthrise
High-definition camera sends back reprise of famous Apollo-era photos

A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earthrise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging.

The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has been orbiting 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon since Oct. 18.

The new Earthrise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. Released on Tuesday, it is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television camera.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

A second image, taken from a different location in the lunar orbit, has been dubbed "Earthset." A related series of still images shows our planet setting beyond the lunar horizon.
(the pic link was so long I didnt copy it)

And thats not the only link that comes up...

The USA has not made a soft landing on the Moon -- manned or unmanned -- in over 35 years. Why not? What are we afraid of (not) finding there?

Nothing.

Why should they spend billions of dollars to take more pictures for you to complain about?

what would be the point?
couldn't you just claim those photos were fake too?

jesus.

Yeah, that's what would happen.

This is what is so funny about this issue. I am asking a completely legitimate question. Why has there not been a single US manned or unmanned lunar landing in over 35 years?

And what I get back is snark. Why?

It really makes no sense. It's as if you live 10 miles away from a huge, wonderful museum and all you have to do is drive over there to see it, but for some reason you shun that museum for museums on distant continents for 35+ years even though you've never even seen half of the great museum in your own hometown.

I have another legitimate question. If you could send a crew of men to land on the moon today, what would you have them do there? Wouldn't you have them do things that unmanned missions would find particularly difficult to do, such as hardcore geological excavation and examination? Wouldn't you have them do shovel work in the places where shovel work could best uncover the most information about the geological history of the moon?

Would you instead have them collect a few scattered topsoil lunar rocks that you could find in the Antarctic, take pictures that unmanned missions could take, hit golf balls, jump around and tool around on moon rovers?

It seems to me impossible that the Moon landings were hoaxes because, unlike most conspiracies, this one would require the silence of scores of knowing co-conspirators, many not spooks by trade. However, why does that mean that I can't ask legitimate questions?

It also seems to me that this of all conspiracy theories would be the easiest to disprove. All we would have to do is train any lunar orbiter (or perhaps even the Hubble telescope) on any of the (supposed) lunar landing sites. So why hasn't something this simple ever been done, if only to honor the single greatest symbolic technological achievement of the human race -- so great that it cannot be duplicated even some 40 years later (except, of course, by one country that supposedly just chooses not to duplicate it)?

[stickdog99]

This stuff is a bit dated, but here are some of the plans for a return to the moon but this time permanently. Also there are newcomers ready to establish lunar bases.

NASA Makes Plans for Permanent Moon Base
Published: December 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — NASA announced plans today for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

Russia to set up manned lunar base
2 Sep 2007, 0451 hrs IST, AGENCIES
MOSCOW: Russia plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent manned base there in 2027-2032, the head of the space agency said on Friday.

The moon - a gigantic leap for the Chinese who spy a business opportunity in space
Beijing takes giant leap into space with plans for lunar station.

Japan Planning Manned Lunar Base Within 20 Years
01 March 2005
Officials with Japan's space agency say they are making plans establish a manned lunar base by 2025.

[Penguin]

stickdogg99:
My snark was solely and completely due to your inability to look stuff up yourself, nothing more. You ask stuff that is both elementary and answered on various sites, found easily. And data from cameras of indian and japanese orbiters is freely available, including photos of all the Apollo landing sites. See also the stuff about Hubble and Kaguya and Chandrayaan camera resolutions for why Hubble is of no use here.

I didnt look thru all the pics on SMART site, if they took photos of the landing sites, they should be there (if not, then Ill grant its suspicious, eh?). Did you look, or did you just ask me?

I didnt yet look em up myself, was very late (3 am) yesterday.

Proof: I hate that word.

Intellectuals don't seek proof, they seek evidence. We sought it, and we received plenty. Sure, the footage could conceivably have been faked, but the mirrors, which are still testable today, could not have been unless they were already there, or they placed them there later. There are countless other pieces of evidence, making it hard to reach any other conclusion. The only alternative hypotheses that are supported by all of the evidence are so far fetched that the question becomes a no-brainer.

Conspiracy theorists seek proof because there is no such thing. They don't want to come to the logical conclusion, so they ignore the evidence, and require this thing you call "proof". You can't "prove" to someone that you exist (you might just be a figment of their imagination); all you can do is provide evidence, and let them decide on the strength of that evidence. If you can't prove something as obvious as your existence, then what hope do you have of proving something happened yesterday, or 40 years ago?

Even mathematical proof is meaningless in the absence of axioms, so can we please stop using that word?

Heres couple more links about the issue:

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/co ... 0238.shtml

Imaging Apollo Landing Sites


If men really landed on the Moon, why are there no telescopic pictures of the landing site taken from Earth? Also, wouldn't there have to be a cameraman outside to photograph Armstrong getting out of the lander?
- question from Dale Miller
The best telescope built by humanity to date is the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) currently in orbit around Earth. This telescope has a maximum resolution of 0.014 arc seconds. If the HST were aimed at the Moon, it would be able to resolve objects no smaller than 27 meters (88.5 feet) across. Each of the Apollo landers is only about 5 meters (16.5 feet) across and much too small to be seen by Hubble. An example of the resolution that the HST can provide is shown in the following image taken of the crater Copernicus.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... acewebo-20
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... acewebo-20

----------------------------------------
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... -the-moon/
A little while back, I blogged about plans to let the SMART-1 probe impact the Moon. My friend Emily Lakdawalla interviewed Bernard Foing, the Project Scientist for SMART-1, about their plans, and she clears up some of the questions I wasn’t able to answer ( http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000496/ ). The impact will occur on or about September 2-3. The uncertainty is due to — get this — the fact that the angle of impact is incredibly small, about a degree, so the probe will be skimming the surface of the Moon for the last few hours. If a hill rears up, smack! Since we don’t know the topography of Moon very accurately, they’re not sure exactly when or where it will hit. That’s amazing, and makes me realize that even though the Moon is the closest of the objects in the sky, there is still a lot more to learn and to know about it.

-----------------------------------------------

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000496/
SMART-1 views Hadley Rille near Apollo 15 landing site

------------------------------------------------

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-explor ... pollo.html
-> http://www.airspacemag.com/space-explor ... sited.html
"The Terrain Camera on Japan's Kaguya spacecraft returned this 3-D view of the Apollo 15 landing site flanking Hadley Rille."

"Japan’s Kaguya orbiter, which since October has been circling the moon and taking high-definition photos and video of the surface, has photographed a patch of bright soil where on July 30, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin touched down. By the Kaguya team’s reckoning, the white patch, which stands out from the darker gray moonscape, is soil disturbed by the rocket blast of the lunar module as it made its final descent, blowing fine dust in every direction. The Apollo astronauts routinely saw these disturbed areas after they returned to lunar orbit following their moonwalks and looked down on their landing sites.

Kaguya’s Terrain Camera has a resolution of 10 meters, which means each picture element, or pixel, corresponds to a surface area about the size of a schoolbus. That’s not quite good enough to clearly make out the squat, 30-foot-wide base of the lunar lander—the descent stage Scott and Irwin left behind when they blasted off the moon."

Until Kaguya, there hadn’t been a camera good enough to spot Apollo artifacts on the moon since the last astronauts left, in 1972. Neither the U.S. Clementine nor the European SMART-1 moon probes, launched in 1994 and 2003, respectively, had enough resolution. (In case you’re wondering, even the best ground-based telescopes can’t make out Apollo hardware on the moon. They have the resolution—some produce sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope—but the objects left by the astronauts aren’t bright enough to be seen.)

So it’s a job for lunar orbiters. Next up is Chandrayaan, India’s first planetary science spacecraft, which is due to arrive at the moon this fall with a camera twice as sharp as Kaguya’s.
-------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1
Chandrayaan beams back 40,000 images in 75 days

Chandrayaan-1 has transmitted more than 40,000 images of different types since its launch on October 22, 2008, which many in ISRO believe is quite a record compared to the lunar flights of other nations. ISRO officials estimated that if more than 40,000 images have been transmitted by Chandrayaan's cameras in 75 days, it worked out to nearly 535 images being sent daily. They are first transmitted to Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore, from where they are flashed to ISRO's telemetry, tracking and command network at Bangalore.

They said some of these images have a resolution of up to five metres providing a sharp and clear picture of the Moon's surface. On the other hand, they said many images sent by some of the other missions had a 100-metre resolution.

On November 26, the indigenous Terrain Mapping Camera, which was first activated on October 29, 2008, took shots of peaks along with craters. This came as a surprise to ISRO officials because the Moon consists mostly of craters.

-----------------
And here is the Indian space agency site, full of photos taken by Chandrayaan.
http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm


Good now? Didnt have to use the search yourself?
(its not that hard - sorry I couldnt resist the snark. All in good spirits, friend!)

[stickdog99]

Why not just the present the photos of the Apollo landing sites themselves if they exist?

[Penguin]

pfft.
I gave a link to Apollo 15 landing site by Kaguya, with the light landing spot visible.

And I gave another with the general area of same Apollo 15.
Cant you dig them up yourself? Do I need to search them all? I narrowed it down quite a lot, I gave you the SMART photo site and Chandrayaan photo site. Look there. Hint - look up the Apolllo landing sites on Wikipedia, for example, then look up those places on Chandrayaan or SMART site. View photos.

[Penguin]

Ok, since Im such a nice guy, here they are:

http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/93941023yENHHK
All sites

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mi ... 10427.html
Apollo 15

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apol ... sites.html
Again, all sites - zoom in

How I found these?
I typed "photos of all apollo landing sites" to Google. Hit enter. Browse.

More:
From the horses mouth -
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm
And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

(MY note - seems it was delayed and is not yet launched - here:
http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/
02.11.09 - The Orbiter is on its way to Florida! We loaded it on the truck and sent it on its way early this morning after successfully completing our Pre-Ship Review (PSR). The PSR started on Monday-exactly 3 years to the day after our Preliminary Design Review, a short time for a mission of this complexity. We spent the last few weeks cleaning up paperwork, packing up our ground support equipment, and practicing the Lunar Orbit Insertion and other early operations. The solar arrays are already in Florida, inspected, and ready for testing with the Orbiter. )

-------------------------

http://www.panoramas.dk/moon/mission-apollo.html
Panoramas created from the original mission photos

------------------------

So far NO camera either in an orbiter, or on a telescope, has the resolution to show those sites in enough detail. The LRO would have the needed resolution.

[Ben D]

no time right now to type much but here's some info on it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program_missing_tapes

Thanks justdrew, checked it out but I don't think there is much of a story there. Apparently the Apollo camera was a Westinghouse Slow Scan TV design, and operated at 325 lines per frame and at 10 frames per second.

This is a lower resolution then standard 525/60 (NTSC) TV so there never was any high resolution video to begin with. What is true is that when the Apollo SSTV video signal was converted at Parkes, or Goldstone, etc., to standard NTSC video, there would be some further slight degradation but that was all factored into account for the meeting of end to end performance specifications.

[stickdog99]

Ok, since Im such a nice guy, here they are:

http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/93941023yENHHK
All sites

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mi ... 10427.html
Apollo 15

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apol ... sites.html
Again, all sites - zoom in

How I found these?
I typed "photos of all apollo landing sites" to Google. Hit enter. Browse.

More:
From the horses mouth -
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm
And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

(MY note - seems it was delayed and is not yet launched - here:
http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/
02.11.09 - The Orbiter is on its way to Florida! We loaded it on the truck and sent it on its way early this morning after successfully completing our Pre-Ship Review (PSR). The PSR started on Monday-exactly 3 years to the day after our Preliminary Design Review, a short time for a mission of this complexity. We spent the last few weeks cleaning up paperwork, packing up our ground support equipment, and practicing the Lunar Orbit Insertion and other early operations. The solar arrays are already in Florida, inspected, and ready for testing with the Orbiter. )

-------------------------

http://www.panoramas.dk/moon/mission-apollo.html
Panoramas created from the original mission photos

------------------------

So far NO camera either in an orbiter, or on a telescope, has the resolution to show those sites in enough detail. The LRO would have the needed resolution.

What a surprise! It is still somehow technologically impossible to even produce photographic evidence of the amazing technological achievements that took place 40 years ago!

[Penguin]

....
Do you photograph, dude?
Know anything about optics, resolution?
I guess Ive said all Im gonna say, here.

(If you paid any attention, youd see how amazingly more accurate cameras each generation of orbiters and telescopes have had - and you might notice that the next planned one takes the resolution several times higher too.)

But matters of belief, those are another matter completely. Faith requires no evidence.
You probably wont believe that light spot is where the module landed.

Well, if the economic shitz doesnt totally blow it, maybe theyll launch that orbiter later this year. Then theyll send clear photos of the objects left on the moon, and then you will say that they doctored those photos.

Mm-hmm.

[LilyPatToo]

Another good point was made by several posters at the landing site photo article--that back then, during the Cold War, the Russians would have leapt upon any evidence at all that the moon landings had been faked. And we who were alive then would have had to listen to their crows of delight ad nauseum

LilyPat

[freemason9]

pfft.
I gave a link to Apollo 15 landing site by Kaguya, with the light landing spot visible.

And I gave another with the general area of same Apollo 15.
Cant you dig them up yourself? Do I need to search them all? I narrowed it down quite a lot, I gave you the SMART photo site and Chandrayaan photo site. Look there. Hint - look up the Apolllo landing sites on Wikipedia, for example, then look up those places on Chandrayaan or SMART site. View photos.

I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this . . .