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China Lands On The Moon
Congrats to China for successfully soft-landing its Chang’e-3 lunar probe and its rover on the moon. It is now the third nation which has done so. The lunar probe is later supposed to return to the earth. Good luck with that. China’s next space program will likely be a manned moon program picking up where the United States ended its large space program.
Congratulations also to Iran which today for the second time lauched a “manned” space flight and successfully landed and recovered the ape that took the flight.
While the scientific values of these flights can be debated the excitement that comes from achieving such aims can not. China and Iran will both be proud of what they did and deserve to be lauded for this technical achievement.
Rowan was quoting me above so I’ll respond. (Moon Landings US.)
What is evident is that some of the pictorial material used to attest and celebrate the event was doctored/faked. This is quite normal for the US and the times. You’d want lovely images, no?
About the Moon.
The moon day / night is 14 earth days for each (cycle of 28 days.) Some parts may (?) always be dark (deep in a crater, poles). The atmosphere is a vacuum, so during the day it is extremely hot, and the night very cold. According to one site, the cold can reach – 238 C (N pole crater) and – 247 C (S pole crater).
An ‘average’ seems to be? from -200 to +200.
Presumably, it is thus -200 at the end of the moon night (at X spot), and when the sun hits, or begins to grip, the temp slowly rises from -200 to +200 during the moon day, over, thus, 14 earth days.
One would want to land in the middle of the moon day – at the chosen spot, and for a manned flight.
No idea at what rate the temp. rises but if constant, then 7 days into the moon’s day, it is zero degrees and rises 28 degrees per the following 24 hour chunks.
Landing at any other time than moon midday would be madness or impossible. (Rough of course.~)
At moon midday – zero degrees C – you have quite some time available for strolling around. That said, the temps. will vary a lot depending on where you go – in shade or in sunlight (depending on the length of time the shade lasts, etc.: grotto vs. sunny terrace on earth..)
It is most curious that this simple night/day issue is seemingly (from the few sites I have read – wiki or NASA) not gone into. As you can see in pix the astronauts wore very shiny suits – that is to reflect the sunlight away and stop the human from boiling.
Examining the Appollo 11 pictures, one notes that there are a lot of images that are: artists renditions (drawn..) – reconstructions (say, photoshop) – extremely realistic photos of training exercises on Earth. Plus, some fanciful made up stuff. All labelled as such or are clear from the content / context. (Some of these then become passed off as ‘real’.)
Then, there are some pix that seem to hover between reconstructed, enhanced, mucked about with, in various ways. Merely sorting the chaff from the wheat (original photos or film from the rest) is extremely difficult. TV / other images of the time were in B _W, and most of ‘our’ images are in color.
Look here for ex. What status does this pic have?
http://tinyurl.com/po8uhwc – click on toggle top for pic full size
The LM (machines overall..) is highlighted and looks sorta unreal, too bright. The ‘seismic equipment’ (??) to the right of ‘Aldrins’ casts shadows – the light coming from the right – partly over the astronaut’s boot but with a white dot, and weird overall, while the LM casts no shadow. The blue and gold colors are clearly added on (fairy lights on the LM!) .. and if you compare the ground to what rises above you can see that some parts have been whitened / lightened. (Inexpertly.)
The pic is on the NASA website (small size.)
http://history.nasa.gov/ap11ann/kippsphotos/apollo.html
By no means the most bizarre pic.
Is this an original that was ‘enhanced’ or just plain fakery? How to decide? This is why moon conspiracist scream fake, understandably. Picture like this are rubbish.
Back to the main point. All the pix, of any kind, of Apollo 11 show night – deep black sky with no stars – with light coming from one direction or another, lighting the ground somewhat, it is always clearly visible, and ‘highlighting’ the central elements: human figures, LM, machinery, the flag. Following on, they were taken at dusk or dawn, with the sun just ‘coming in’, ‘going down’… I don’t think so …it would have been too hot or too cold.
Heh. Just to show how difficult all this is. 🙂 And that pix are obviously altered for prop purposes.
The Chinese clearly landed (from pix) during the day.
Posted by: Noirette | Dec 17 2013 15:25 utc | 34
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