Photos from Apollo 11 film footage

[Tedward]

Yeah but no but yeah.... Part of the problem for me getting my head around this is IF you were hoaxing it you would get the faces in? Would you worry about it? I can see that getting the faces in could be seen as "look! They are here!" from that point of view you could argue that the lack of obvious faces proves they went, or not. It is a lame duck in the annals of hoaxery. If you are really going and you are not thinking of the hoax, why would you, you would get on with it and come home safe. Anything snapped to film is a bonus.

profmunkin, there are several questions outstanding and I do not want to derail them but this idea does not fly.

(repeats parrot sketch for comedy effect).

[slang]

(repeats parrot sketch for comedy effect).

"This hoax theory is just sleeping!.... There! IT MOVED!"

[Abaddon]

I'm kind of wondering if maybe in the case of Apollo 11 there was a conscious decision by the astronauts to not show their faces because they "came in peace for all mankind". When you look at the famous picture of Buzz that I use as my avatar, you can't tell if it's a man or woman, or what their race is, because you can't see his face. Maybe that was intentional.

It seems like something Neil would do because he is often quick to remind us that a lot of people are responsible for getting him to the Moon. Buzz, on the other hand seems like more of a publicity seeker, at least recently.

Neil Armstrong from the DAC, visor up.
http://blogs.sitepointstatic.com/images/tech/118-backup-nasa.jpg

But notice he's looking cross sun.

It doesn't matter much. The fact remains, the astronauts could raise/lower the visor to suit their own comfort level. The notion that no such picture exists, or that the astronauts deliberately did not, or never,  show their faces is clearly wrong.

[raven]

There is even video of Apollo astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, with their visors up.

[ka9q]

http://fotkidepo.ru/photo/178228/3125313GTDvoHY/C9vH6JDStB/428704.jpg

Odd. This one looks like it has a serious oxidizer leak. I wonder if that's normal.

I know that some rockets (like the Titan III/IV) injected N₂O₄ from separate tanks into their SRB plumes to deflect them for steering, but the Proton has multiple liquid fueled engines that I assume are at least partly gimbaled for steering.

[ka9q]

What I need to be convinced, this is a great question and to be fair, an answer.
A probe that is independent of all government, that can transmit high resolution pictures of landing site.
Or a Earth based telescope powerful enough to acquire a high resolution image of landing site

And you know full well you're not going to get either of these any time soon, so you feel quite safe in stating them knowing that you'll never actually have to revise your position based on their results. Like Jay said, this lets you pretend you're being reasonable when you're anything but.

How about if NASA launches a probe with a really good telescope into lunar orbit and then hands all the operations over to an independent university group who decides what to photograph and publishes all the raw image data for the world to see? What's wrong with this one except that it's already underway and clearly shows every Apollo site?

[ka9q]

What is seen in this photo of the Orbiter, if it is authentic?

It's authentic.

Here is what the photographer, astronaut Joseph P. Allen, said about it in his NASA Oral History Project interview on 18 March 2004:

The first time we did an OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] burn—it’s to change your orbit ever so slightly, after we were safely in space and the payload bay doors were open—you do the countdown and [fire the engine]. Since the burn was being done by Vance and Bob Overmyer, Bill and I had only to just look out the back and see at T-minus-zero the OMS engines ignite, and to my astonishment, it looked like the back of the Orbiter blew off. It just went [demonstrates], this enormous flash of light—[totally unexpected]. You hear kind of a “whump” of the engine starting, [and see] a flash of light. It just is there and then it’s gone, even though the engine continues to burn.

I later learned there’s a reason for that. The engines are started rich, more fuel than oxidizer, in order to make sure a clean burn starts, and then [the mixture is] made lean again, such that everything gets burned and there’s no light at all. You would think there would be light from a rocket; there’s none, at least looking out the back.

Every OMS burn from that time—I mean, we did maybe four or five during that mission—with every one, I would have a camera and at T-equals-zero I would take a photograph. To my astonishment, one of those photographs has the flash on it. [The] “OMS burn” [photo is] in the Entering Space book, [and] in several NASA publications. [It turns out] the flash lasts for only a fifth of a second, [a fact] we can tell that from video, TV cameras, camcorders. About a fifth of a second. The exposure of a camera is a sixtieth of a second, so you have to put a sixtieth of a second right during that fifth of a second, which is virtually impossible to do. But I got very lucky and was quite pleased by that result.

Isn't it a shame that the hoax believers never seem to keep metadata like this attached to the photographs they present?

[ka9q]

Is it an anomaly that as the lander is descending, the exhaust does not produce any light?

No. Hypergolic plumes are invisible in vacuum. They're only barely visible even in an atmosphere.

As the lander moves over the lunar landscape, it does not show any visible effects on the landscape in the form of a bright spot or lighting shadowed areas as in capture image attached.

Nor should it. However, you do see a faint "shadow" of the plume caused by the way it randomly refracts the sunlight passing through the very hot and turbulent gas stream. And of course when you get close to the surface it starts blasting dust radially outward at speeds so high that they look like continuous streams of fluid.

I would sure like to see a soundstage in a vacuum chamber big enough to allow a real LM DPS engine to burn for minutes to get these effects for the photography of the supposedly fake mission. Do you have any idea how much gas would have to be exhausted almost instantly by the vacuum system?

[Bob B.]

... but the Proton has multiple liquid fueled engines that I assume are at least partly gimbaled for steering.

Yes, the Proton gimbals its engines for steering.

[Bob B.]

I would sure like to see a soundstage in a vacuum chamber big enough to allow a real LM DPS engine to burn for minutes to get these effects for the photography of the supposedly fake mission. Do you have any idea how much gas would have to be exhausted almost instantly by the vacuum system?

NASA actually does have a chamber capable of testing rocket engines in simulated high-altitude conditions.  It's the Spacecraft Propulsion Research Facility at Plum Brook station near Sandusky, Ohio.  Of course it could never be used to fake a moon landing because the chamber is only 38' diameter (33' diameter test area) and the bottom of it has exhaust ducts and so forth, so there's no place to set up a fake moon set.  The facility also didn't begin operations until 1970.

[cjameshuff]

Odd. This one looks like it has a serious oxidizer leak. I wonder if that's normal.

It seems to be a common feature of Proton launches. My first thought was exhaust from turbopumps, but the Proton apparently uses staged combustion engines that should run all that through the engines themselves. Maybe just leftover nitrogen tetroxide boiling out of the plumbing used to load propellant.

[profmunkin]

I was shocked by the photographs of hypergolic fueled rockets without a visible plume.
I must say that this was enough evidence to cause me to move to a neutral position on the subject of moon landings.
I can say that at this point there is no substantial evidence or smoking gun that I can point to to disprove a moon landing.

Even though I still don't believe it was possible, I won't say it was not accomplished.

I want to thank all of you for your postings, informative.

[profmunkin]

In the age of tubes and transistors, how did the Russians or the USA soft land probes on the moon?
Has anyone actually studied the technology and determined that someone in the 60's figured out how to get a probe to ignite rockets to decelerate and finally soft land while maintaining correct trajectory and orientation?

[Glom]

In the age of tubes and transistors, how did the Russians or the USA soft land probes on the moon?

We're in the age of transistors now.  Even the SS Botany Bay had them, much to Scotty's amusement.

Has anyone actually studied the technology and determined that someone in the 60's figured out how to get a probe to ignite rockets to decelerate and finally soft land while maintaining correct trajectory and orientation?

Erm, yeah.  Pretty much the entirety of the aerospace industry.

You pose the question as though you think engineering feats happen in isolation.

[JayUtah]

Even though I still don't believe it was possible, I won't say it was not accomplished.

This is an incompatible position.  If it was done, then ipso facto it is possible to do.  I think what you mean to say is that you don't yet understand how it was done.  That's normal; advanced aerospace engineering is not something most people understand without considerable training and study.

I want to thank all of you for your postings, informative.

You're welcome.