[zonbron]

News Channel 5 - No, Really, We've Landed On The Moon

Twelve people have walked on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo program, at a cost of more than $25 billion.

Granted, it's not something everyone gets to experience. But to this day some claim it never happened: seven percent of respondents, in some polls collected as recently as 2013. (Video via NASA)

That's, uh, lunacy. Let's break down some of these arguments and beat them into submission with science. (Video via NASA)

First, one of the favorites: that American flag is waving in the breeze! There's no breeze on the airless moon, therefore this is fake. (Video via NASA)

No, this is inertia. As NASA explains, "Unfurling a piece of rolled-up cloth with stored angular momentum will naturally result in waves and ripples -- no breeze required!"

The Apollo 11 crew bent some of the rods intended to hold the flag out straight, which added some ripples. The Apollo 12 astronauts had the same issue. (Video via NASA)

Okay, but there's no crater at Lunar Module landing sites! How do you land 36,000 pounds of spaceship and astronauts without digging out a bunch of that moon dust?

First, gravitational acceleration on the moon is roughly six times weaker than it is on Earth, so the Lunar Descent Engine didn't have to work all that hard: closer to 6,000 pounds of thrust, rather than 36,000.

And the LEM throttled back as it approached the surface, to make landing as smooth as possible. Less thrust means less crater. (Video via NASA)

What about the multiple light sources? Like those you might see illuminating a film set?

Sunlight reflects off objects on the moon the same way it does here on Earth. So all of these images and videos include light reflecting from Earth, the lunar module, and from the dust on the surface. (Video via NASA)

Which leads us to the complete lack of stars. Pretty amateur mistake by the set director, right? They should fire their art guys.

Actually, this is a matter of camera settings. Apollo astronauts had to set the cameras they used — these Hasselblad 500ELs — to properly expose the environment and the work they were doing.

You could probably ramp up the exposure to get dim stars in the background, but it would blow out everything else.

...

En, ivm. de hamvraag "waarom nu deze beelden vrijmaken?" Rus verzameld geld om te bewijzen dat de VS daadwerkelijk naar de maan ging:

The Moscow Times - *** Russian Space Enthusiast Raises 1 Million Rubles to Prove U.S. Moon Landing ***

When Vitaly Yegorov watched in awe as NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars three years ago, he never could have imagined his fascination with space would one day lead to the genesis of his own satellite — and a 1 million ruble campaign to dispel a popular Russian conspiracy theory that the U.S. moon landings were faked.

Yegorov, 33, a Moscow-based PR specialist, proposed building a satellite to go into lunar orbit and take high-resolution photographs of the moon’s surface to document evidence of the landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, as well as the Luna and Lunokhod Soviet-era space missions.

The project made the headlines in Russia this week after the amount of money raised via the Boomstarter.ru crowdfunding platform reached 1 million rubles ($15,400) in only five days.

Yegorov initially planned to raise 800,000 rubles ($12,100) when he launched a crowdfunding campaign on Oct. 1, but on Monday he wrote on Facebook that the campaign had “reached a million,” which was 200,000 rubles more than he had asked for.

“I wasn’t expecting it. I thought we would raise the necessary amount [800,000 rubles] within a week,” the enthusiast told The Moscow Times in a phone interview. According to him, the amount raised will only cover the research stage of the project. The cost of actually creating a satellite might add up to between $5 million and $10 million.

LOL

Geopolitiek en samenzweringen.