Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[Andy_Ross]

Er, Eastman Kodak commissioned a bespoke film for Apollo11.

What was the bespoke part?
The film emulsions weren't bespoke.

 

[JayUtah]

Undergoing decontamination procedures does not require you be contaminated by radiation.

It is useful only if contamination is the threat. Undergoing a decontamination procedure does nothing for you if all that has happened to you is that you have been irradiated. Conversely, if you have been contaminated then the risk is ongoing irradiation from the contaminant. You must be decontaminated and also treated for the effects of irradiation.

The astronauts were not exposed to any radiological contaminants. There was no need for them to be decontaminated. They were, however, irradiated by various sources. There was considerable attention paid to the possible effects of that irradiation and considerable engineering effort expended to minimize the degree to which they were irradiated.

 

[JayUtah]

I'm trying to keep up with this hilarious thread, but I'm still chuckling over the idea that Vixen thinks there is a 66,000 km high hill on the Moon. Oh my days.

To be clear, she doesn't think any such thing. She wants to say that I accused her of believing such a thing. I made no such accusation. As usual she's straw-manning her critics' claims to make her critics seem irrational or mean-spirited.

 

[Mojo]

You don't need to actually be irradiated to qualify for decontamination...

No, you need to have come in contact with, or to have potentially come in contact with, something that might have contaminated you.

 

[Andy_Ross]

What's the other 48.5 seconds for?

holding up the birdie and saying smile?

 

[Mojo]

Undergoing decontamination procedures does not require you be contaminated by radiation.

No, you need to have been contaminated by radioactive material. You're clearly having trouble differentiating radiation from radioactive material.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Look, you know perfectly well Armstrong & Aldrin had supposedly been kicking up the radioactive dust on the Moon surface, together with all kinds of highly radioactive protons and gamma rays in the Moon's immediate environment. This will have been transferred into the capsule. Claiming to have disrobed inside the capsule at splashdown and sprayed with antiseptic does nothing to mitigate this possible radioactive contamination. Further, having to remove their spacesuits without help could well mean they inhaled all kinds of dust particles in the process. So either the threat was real and they needed to properly decontaminate (whether or not there was any radiation contamination possibility) or NASA knew it was unnecessary and the squirting with Dettol for 'Moon Germs' was just a stunt for the TV cameras.

What radioactive dust?

How do protons and gamma rays transfer in to the capsule? Apart from the protons that are in all the atoms the capsule is made from?

 

[Mojo]

What radioactive dust?

How do protons and gamma rays transfer in to the capsule? Apart from the protons that are in all the atoms the capsule is made from?

Those were Earth protons, not Moon protons.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Yep.

How radioactive is dust from the moon?
What type of radiation?
What is your evidence for this radiation?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

What would the screening be?
They were wearing dosimeters, what else should be done?

They should have upgraded to tresimeters. Nowadays they use cincoimeters.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Nope.

I explained secondary radiation to you previously at length. Obviously you don't have the brains to understand it.

Lunar surface material is not radioactive per se. It emits secondary radiation as a response to being bombarded by energetic particles: GCRs and solar protons. It does this only for as long as the primary bombardment persists. Similarly I could take a shovel full of Earth dirt to the Moon and it would also give off secondary neutrons, gamma rays, and x-rays as long as it's exposed to solar and galactic primary radiation. And it too would stop doing that as soon as I removed it from the environment where that primary radiation occurs.

Lunar surface material is not inherently radioactive. It does not become radioactive when it is exposed to the space environment. It—and many other things—emit secondary radiation as a response to being irradiated. When they are no longer irradiated, they stop giving off the secondary radiation because there's nothing to cause it.

Lunar surface material is not a radiological contaminant. Full stop.

There's more radioactivity in my old Rolex watch dial than in moon dust.
Although there's no glow left in the radium/phospher paint on the hour markers now.

 

[LondonJohn]

There isn't a high risk of radiation contact if they stayed within Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) because they would have been largely protected by being within the Earth's atmosphere.

Aside from all the other wrongness present in this post of yours, I'd also add two other howlers in passing:

1) It's not "Lower Earth Orbit", it's "Low Earth Orbit". You've been corrected on this several times now.

2) LEO typically takes place in the 600 km - 2,000 km altitude band above Earth. Whereas the common measure of the effective end of the Earth's atmosphere - the Karman line - is at around 100 km. Therefore, all LEOs are considered to be outside of the Earth's atmosphere.

Please, please refrain from embarrassing yourself again and again.

 

[Smock]

Yep.

Are you still operating under the idea that something which is irradiated (the moon dust) is thereafter, in itself, radioactive? If so, that may be the silliest thing you've put forth so far, and you've put forth some real doozys.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Um... radioactive protons?

You read it here first folks: experimental confirmation of proton decay on the moon. Call the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences!

 

[JesseCuster]

There isn't a high risk of radiation contact if they stayed within Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) because they would have been largely protected by being within the Earth's atmosphere.

The earth's atmosphere does not provide any (meaningful) radiation protection to anyone or anything in low earth orbit. Let's see if you can figure out why. Try Googling it or your local library.

 

[sackett]

Cincoimeters. Yes, ICE uses them every May to test for Latinotamination.
Very bad stuff.

 

[steenkh]

A joke shouldn't need to be explained.

A good joke shouldn't need to be explained, but this wasn't an apparent joke at all.

 

[Foster Zygote]

We were talking about Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins logistics in having to arrange a live TV broadcast from a specific location at a specific time from 250,000 miles away, as well as all the other stuff they had to coordinate via a crib sheet.

The logistics were that they turned on the camera and the high gain antenna, which was pointed at earth, transmitted the signal to earth, where it was received by the radio telescopes of the DSTN, which were pointed at the moon. That's the logistics.

But please, tell us what you think the logistics of transmitting a TV signal from the moon to earth would be.

So NASA 'explains' it as their having to point the actual TV cameras at a monitor that only NASA had access to. Those images could have come from anywhere.

Although the slow scan TV signal wasn't NTSC compatible, it was combined with the rest of the Apollo signals, including voice and data, and could clearly be tracked as originating from the moon.

 

[LondonJohn]

A good joke shouldn't need to be explained, but this wasn't an apparent joke at all.

Indeed. It most assuredly wasn't meant as a joke the first few times Vixen used it. That's abundantly clear. It's only once her gross error of understanding had finally been hammered home to her that she tried to shrug it off as a "joke".

 

[JayUtah]

Please, please refrain from embarrassing yourself again and again.

But how else is she going to get us to 500 pages?

There's more radioactivity in my old Rolex watch dial than in moon dust.

Considerably more.

What makes the lunar surface emit radiation is the fact that it's on the Moon. The environment is what makes it do that, not some property of the material itself. Earth dirt, water, or angel food cake will emit secondary radiation if you put it in the lunar environment. As long as it's being bombarded by solar protons and GCRs, it will emit some form of secondary radiation. Once you take your cake back indoors, it will stop emitting secondary radiation and be quite safe to eat. Actually it would be safe to eat at any point, because the act of eating will remove the cake from the environmental causes that make it emit secondary radiation.

At no time in this process will any of those substances become a radiological contaminant.

The radium on a watch dial would be a radiological contaminant because the radium spontaneously emits radiation at all times, not just in response to something else. If you get the radium on you or (heaven forbid!) in you, it will keep emitting radiation that is absorbed immediately, directly, and constantly by the surrounding tissue for as long as the radium is there. It's not the substance per se that is a danger. The danger is that you're being constantly irradiated by the contaminant and you will want to take physical precautions to remove the contaminant—decontamination. Then, separately, you will need to address the biological effects of having been irradiated.

Are you still operating under the idea that something which is irradiated (the moon dust) is thereafter, in itself, radioactive?

She's not smart enough to distinguish among various causes and effects, so I would say no. She has specifically disavowed that she believes that exposing something to radiation makes it radioactive. The problem seems to be that when she reads something that says, "The lunar surface is radioactive," she doesn't understand how or why that is. Consequently she can only think of it as inherently radioactive and therefore a contaminant because that's her simplistic understanding of what "is radioactive" could mean.

Um... radioactive protons?

Yeah, that's got to be today's howler.

Protons can't themselves be radioactive. "Radioactive" means something that gives off radiation—typically ionizing radiation is what we care about. The radiation being given off is particles than can include protons, depending on the mode of radioactivity. Protons don't emit radiation, they are radiation. The person who doesn't know this foundational concept is the one trying to school everyone on how radiation works.