by StarmanSkye » Fri Jan 20, 2006 6:26 pm
re: Spotting Apollo artifacts via earth-based spy satellites, or Hubble.<br>Orz: Great point:<br>_____________________________________<br>If NASA posted a hubble picture of the Apollo site on their website tomorrow, would everyone say "Oh, OK, sorry, i was wrong, clearly we did go to the moon"?<br>_____________________________________<br>Of course, Hoax diehards will find a flaw in EVERY proof or evidence that contradicts their faith-based thesis. No doubt, when the ESA Smart-1 spacecraft currently orbitting the moon and mapping the surface (capable of 7-meter resolution at 300 km elevation) flies lower and lower due to orbital decay, the images it will send back of Apollo flights will be trumped as 'fakes'. So too with images provided by the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which will arrive at the Moon in 2008. "It will be equipped with a camera capable of resolving the surface of the Moon down to half a metre (1.6 feet). Some of the larger structures on the Moon are 9 metres (30 feet) across, so they should be easy to spot by the orbiter." <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/moon.html">www.universetoday.com/am/.../moon.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>Spy satellites at an elevation of 80 to 100 miles have an optical resolution claimed to be a couple feet --there have been unofficial claims that they are capable of reading licence plates -- I don't know if that's true. But spy satellites, assuming a one ft resolution at 100 miles, even IF they could or would be pointed at the moon, would have an optical resolution (given they'd be some 240,000 miles from the moon) of one ft X 2400 -- or 2400 feet. That's off by at least a factor of 6 to detect something about 30 ft across. The Hubble telescope is several orders of magnitude more capable -- but even then, limited by the laws of physics governing light and lenses, the best the Hubble would be capable of is detecting objects on the moon of 405 feet, or 107 meters. The largest human artifacts left on the moon thru Apollo are about 9 meters -- so Hubble would have to be 15 times more powerful, OR about 8 times closes to the moon. I did a back-of-envelope calculation -- reducing distances by half 8 times nets an equivalency of resolution of 1.5 feet at an elevation of 937 miles -- which suggests that spy satellites, IF they could be made as optimally efficient as Hubble, could resolve objects down to an inch or less. But no doubt atmospheric diffusion and the spy satellites len's smaller size and technical limitations prevent spy satellites from having performance equal to Hubble. (Perhaps, even with 1/3 the maximum efficiency of Hubble, a resolution of one inch was considered perfectly adequate for spy purposes, a balance between cost and function.)<br>Also: Excellant point, JD. I agree, the scientific skepticism and technical naivite' of a large segment of the public is an issue of equal if not greater interest and importance than the mostly trivial and sophomoric arguments supporting the hoax thesis. Even when information is so readily available via a few keystrikes on a search engine and reading a few webpages, people STILL remain mis-or-uninformed about a lot of things that really aren't that complex. Of course, we see that with how dumb much of the public is about current events and contemporary history, not to mention the even more obscure topics of parapolitics.<br>Widespread suspician of and distrust of 'the government', along with mass media, academia/science, business, financial institutions, and gov. agencies like the Pentagon, Whitehouse, NASA, and CIA, would tend to make a society cynical and disenfranchised. The trends we've seen all add to this, so skepticism re: officialdom is not only logical but almost essential, extending from the evidence of protected institutional corruption, opportunistic exploitation of fear via the War on Terror, bureaucratic unaccountability, hyper-secrecy via National Security, Constitional Crisis, Congressional cowardice and incompetance, attacks on Bill of Rights, increasing influence of Religious Right, enormous waste, fraud and hypocrisy in the War on Drugs and Crime, shameless War profiteering, gov. subversion via Lobbying, election fraud and insider no-bid billion-dollar contracts, monopolistic control of 'news' via mass media co-option, lies to provoke Wars defending the Fed's ponzai scheme, IMF/World Bank/US State Dept. debt-peonage of the developing world ... It goes on and on and on. The American public has been lied to to such an extent, I really can't overly blame the Moon hoax believers for their instinctual mistrust of the NASA bureaucracy. But, to qualify -- After looking at the arguments, the ONLY thing that either wasn't too absurd to take seriously or that didn't fall apart on rigorous examination, was Jack White's time and motion studies re: the 5700+ photos the astronauts (presumably) took. But even then, White exaggerated the effort, complexity and time required for such things as the panaramic views the astonauts took. <br><br>Also, I suspect that as many as three or even more different photos may have been printed from a given original slide image. This was possible by the large 4X5 film format, so each original positive-film image the astronauts took had the potential for a great deal of detail and information that could be 'parsed' into several blown-up photographs. So, I think there's much more that could be found about what went into creating NASA's Apollo photo archives. I don't find the argument compelling to 'prove' the 12 astronauts on 6 flights consisting of several hundred hours couldn't have taken the photos claimed.<br>Starman<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/676.html">sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/676.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>In Reply to: HUBBLE AND DID THE AMERICANS GO TO THE MOON! posted by MALCOLM O'DELL on December 31, 1999 at 13:23:45:<br><br>> IF THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE CAN RESOLVE A CAR HEADLIGHT FROM MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF MILES AWAY, WHY CAN'T NASA POINT IT AT THE NASA APOLLO LANDING SITES AND PROVE THE LUNAR MODULE AND THE CRASHED ASCENT STAGE ARE REALLY UP THERE ONCE AND FOR ALL!!<br><br>It is true that the Hubble Space Telescope can see things very clearly - one can argue that it provides the clearest view of the sky in visible light "colors" that humans have ever had. However, its capabilities are still limited by the laws of physics.<br><br>For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by: resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians<br><br>This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.<br><br>The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of<br>size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters<br>at the Moon's surface ... roughly the size of a football field.<br><br>This is quite a bit larger than any of the artifacts you would want to see on the lunar surface, so even Hubble's tremendous clarity is not enough for what you would like to do! If we had an aircraft carrier at the lunar surface, then Hubble could probably get a pretty good look at it. <br><br>How far can Hubble resolve a pair of headlights? We can reverse the above calculation to find out. Let's say that headlights are separated about 1.5 meters. Then we want:<br>distance = / = 4700 km = 2910 miles <br><br>Thus, Hubble can tell that there are two headlights on a car if the car were at a distance comparable to the separation of the East and West coasts of the US. If the car were any farther away than this, the two headlights would appear as a single blob of light - we could still see it, but it is harder to tell that there are two sources of light instead of one. <p></p><i></i>