Ground Truth: Apollo Sites Photographed

July 17, 2009

Today, in an uncharacteristically low-key press event, NASA released photos we’ve been waiting 40 years for: the first images takes from space that are sharp enough to resolve the Apollo landers. (There was only a press teleconference; NASA-TV kept all the airtime for showing the space shuttle Endeavour docking with the International Space Station.)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures soon exploded across the Internet.  Web sites are now abuzz with people mercilessly lambasting the moon conspiracy whack-jobs who for four decades have tried to discredit the Apollo program, and the technical prowess of the United States. My favorite new term for the conspiracy nuts – posted on YouTube – is “hoaxtards.”

The sun is in the late afternoon sky in all the photos and the Lunar Module descent stage shadows look long and rectangular pointing eastward (toward the sun's direction when the LM’s originally landed). The Apollo 14 landing site actually shows the trails of the astronauts and their golf cart tool caddy.

The images can be downloaded in full resolution.

Hard-core conspiracy buffs will analyze these pictures to death to look for “evidence” the photos were doctored in Photoshop, and that NASA – supposedly once again –  messed up on some technical detail that betrays the pictures as phony.

But at last the entire numbskull moon hoax conspiracy theories are doomed to crumble into the dust as everyone – even Fox-TV, ignores them.

But fantasies die hard. There will be those, without any understanding of photography, who will apply their own dimwitted notion of "common sense" to claim that the shadows are all wrong,  or that they correspond to objects 800 feet high! Or they will dredge up other details in the pixels that they say are inconsistent with the data being real. Yady, yady, ya!

From the other camp of whack-jobs, those who think aliens are running around on the moon, will come other bizarre interpretations. They might even imagine seeing evidence that aliens tampered with the landing sites. Maybe they took the wheels off the moon buggies, ore stole the buggies all together for the Tau Ceti Air and Space Museum. The aliens will be accused of stealing those notorious “waving” American flags (which are below LRO’s resolution).

The lander stages are only 14 feet across and stand about 10 feet high. Now if they were alien artifacts, like the mysterious 2001 black monolith, would we overlook them as simply boulders casting shadows?

Stay tuned for even sharper LRO images of the Apollo sites. The one site missing from the collection is Apollo 12. When photographed it will include a view of the Lunar Surveyor III which the crew landed near.

What's sobering is that in the vacuum of space these landers will far outlast the Egyptian pyramids. They will be practically eternal monuments to the adventure and curiosity of a species that dared to venture beyond Earth's cradle -- an evolutionary step as profound as when the first sea creatures ventured onto the dry land.