40th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landings

[bfg00]

As some of you may know it is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landings.  Recently NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which among its jobs was to image the Apollo landing sites.  The article on Bad Astronomy is here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/17/apollo-landing-sites-imaged-by-lro/

Hopefully this will finally silence any conspiracy theorists who haven't been decked by Buzz Aldrin.

[JG]

Unfortunately the conspiracy nuts like to question the authenticity of any photograph.  I find the laser/mirror experiment and the pieces of Surveyor 3 returned in the 12 mission to be more definative proof that we actually went there - neither could have been accomplished by a robot back then (and likely impossible even today)

[bfg00]

True that.  Still it's nice to have some current pictures of the landing spots, just because its interesting to take a look at.

[JG]

Shame that its the nearly worthless lower stages though.  The much more valuable upper stages were unsalvagable by design - although in theory we could still go get the Apollo 10 LM ascent stage (callsign Snoopy) floating around out there.  Its the only one that wasn't crashed into the moon's surface after LOR or burned up in Earth's atmosphere (as was the case with the LEO missions and 13)


This thread makes me want to look up other pictures of man's impact on the moon.  In particular I wonder how big a crater and how wide an ejecta blanket the spent S-1b boosters made when they were crashed into the moon for seismic studies.

[bfg00]

A good and interesting question.  Actually the Japanese probe Kaguya recently ran into the moon on June 10 and the NASA LCROSS's upper stage will do the same on Oct. 9.  Ah, gotta love the particle physics way of experimentation, as my Modern Physics professor put it:

"Its like taking a Grandfather Clock and throwing rocks at it.  Then figuring out how the clock works for how the rocks bounce off it and how the clock breaks."

[RoveNivyviesk]

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[JG]

Dammit, what the hell is going on in this thread?  Every day there's at least a spam advertisement or two that shows up in this thread (and only this thread) that I have to delete.

UPDATE:
I have flexed my admin muscles and banned this user and IP.  If spam shows up again I'm banning the entire host and IP range.

[JG]

I didn't want to do it but spam keeps showing up in this thread so I'm locking it.  Hopefully it won't lead to contamination of other threads.