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Wednesday, August 27, 2008
HEY hALE BOPP! Moon landing hoax
News has it the myth Busters are going after the moon hoax wednesday. If we landed on the day side, and we have such powerful telescopes, why aren't we able to see the lander from afar? Wouldn't this settle all arguments once and for all? Where are the pictures we have certainly(?) been able to take for decades? I've always thought it'd be cool to have a telescope generated picture of the lander base.
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Of course it was a hoax. The government can't even direct traffic; how are they going to send a spaceship a gazillion miles away and back? Nowadays, they just use computer generated graphics to show us "pictures" of Mars or Venus or whatever. All the money that supposedly goes to NASA is spent by politicians on partying.
Well, I have been battling this stuff for a long time and have been accused of being a NASA disinfo agent...really.
Okay, science and math alert here. The telescope with the best resolution is the Hubble Space Telescope (atmospheric distortion prevents ground based telescopes from matching it at visible wavelengths although adaptive optics is helping ground based telescopes catch up). It has a resolution of .1 arc seconds which converts to 4.84*10^-7 radians. The Moon is 3.84*10^8m away. To find the smallest object you can resolve on the Moon with this telescope, you simply multiply the resolution in radians times the distance in meters and find the smallest object Hubble could resolve on the Moon is about 186 meters across, or about the size of two football fields. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but the lunar lander base is WAY less than the smallest object Hubble can see (I know it is less than 10 meters for sure!)
The problem is that we just can't take the pictures. The Moon is pretty far away and the resolution of the best telescopes can easily be shown to be inadequate to image the lander using some freshmen college optics and trigonometry.
As to the Mythbusters show, I am looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Phil Plait, an old friend of mine, was a consultant on the show.
Phil just posted a blog entry on tonight's episode. To sum up: He likes it. I am looking forward to it...already programmed in the DVR (and yeah, I will probably watch it instead of Clinton...I'll read the transcript!)
I just found out that Phil Plait, one of the consultants on the Mythbusters episode, will be on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory tonight. He is a semi-regular guest on the show...any night owls can give it a listen.
I caught the show. It was very cool. Thanks for the heads up. It was amazing how close their tricked up photos were to the original. I don't think they found it necessary to blow anything up... maybe a myth buster first. :)
It was one of the better Mythbusters I've seen in a while.
And KK, they showed footage of things blowing up, I guess that fills that requirement without blowing up million dollar NASA equipment.
Well, I for one am glad they didn't have to reproduce an Saturn V blowing up!
Oh admit it Hale, you would have loved to see that happen. Big explosions are cool.
Ya, they could have a TV show for guys called "Big Explosions Are Cool" where all they do is blow up things. I'd watch religiously.
The best part would be when the buildings fall down. Thats cool.
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