Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[Jrrarglblarg]

"Because landing-point accuracy was a secondary consideration on the Apollo 11 mission, this down-range position error was UNIMPORTANT." Who is the rat that penned that abaddon? Who do you think?

Rather than waving your arms around incredulously, could you perhaps explain why you feel this statement is important?

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

So the co<snip>iends!

Why would anyone, at any time, in any place fire any laser at all at Apollo 12?

Why?

Do you have any idea how expensive a large laser is even today?

There would be absolutely ZERO purpose for firing a laser at Apollo 12. Nobody would do so as there was no reflector in the ALSEP for that mission.

You really should do your homework. The contents of the ALSEPs for the various missions is well documented and the science data was written up by outside (non NASA) researchers afterward.

 

[Dave Rogers]

I can't wait until we get to Apollo 13.

I think the arguments that Apollo 13 never landed on the moon are a bit more rational.

Dave

 

[Longfellow]

(...snip...) In 5 years you'll read all about this when the tables have turned, Apollo is recognized as masquerade, and the other HBs and myself proceed to write about this stuff ad nauseam, a veritable Apollo believer's hell if you will.

If I remember correctly, you jumped on the Apollo Hoax bandwagon rather recently. With regards to the quote above, I feel compelled to tell you that what you claim will never, ever, ever happen. Why? Because Apollo Hoax Believers have been around practically since the start of the Lunar Mission program and have been claiming the exact same thing.

Guess what? Nothing whatsoever came of their claims and never will just as nothing will ever come of your claims and never will. You have wasted an extraordinary amount of time on something that will cause you great disappointment in the end and, frankly, I feel sorry for you.

 

[Oji]

I think the arguments that Apollo 13 never landed on the moon are a bit more rational.

I am half-expecting the good doctor to tell us that Apollo 13 is only mission that did actually get to the moon...

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

Actually, Apollo 13 was the only mission that DID land on the moon. The astronauts were so sicked by the Searing Radiation Hell^tm of the lunar surface that the equipment failure scenario was concocted just in case Houston had to scuttle the craft to destroy the bodies.

All the Apollo missions had a nuclear self-destruct device built into the Service Module.

Everyone else knows this. Why don't you?

 

[drewid]

Of course if Patty was worth his salt he'd be well aware that the actual landing position really didn't matter. The important thing was the relative position between LM and CSM.

all the flowery nonsense in the writing, (which is most of it), is a sure sign of someone who overestimates their own competence.

 

[R.A.F.]

Won't you join in and learn...

Now ain't you just full of yourself. The audacity that you think you could "teach" us anything astounds me.

Totally delusional.

 

[frenat]

In 5 years you'll read all about this when the tables have turned, Apollo is recognized as masquerade, and the other HBs and myself proceed to write about this stuff ad nauseam, a veritable Apollo believer's hell if you will.

I'll bet you $10,000 that won't happen. In 5 years the hoax ideas will still be seen as the ignorant trash they are today.

 

[nomuse]

"Because landing-point accuracy was a secondary consideration on the Apollo 11 mission, this down-range position error was UNIMPORTANT." Who is the rat that penned that abaddon? Who do you think?

That's error in where the spacecraft lands, not where it is determined to HAVE landed!

You keep misreading your sources.

And, yes...as your very source says, a ten-second difference in launch is still within the performance parameters of the LM alone -- that's not even including the CSM maneuver budget for rendezvous.

Again, there was an error, a known error, an error with known causes, and an error of estimated magnitude between where the spacecraft intended to touch down and where it did touch down. This does not translate into an error of similar magnitude in knowledge of its position after reconciliation of the different navigational methods.

NOR does the magnitude of range between the first estimates using different methods have anything to do with the final circle of error once the causes for many of these discrepancies have been identified and corrections applied.

You simply don't understand what you are reading.

 

[nomuse]

So the common denominator in the 11 and 12 Missions is the star phobia, laser phobia. The missions are as we all can see so very well now, totally bogusly bogus. One way to expose the missions as bogus, one way to show the astronauts were not on the moon, but more likely than not warming up for Halloween, would be to hit them with a laser in various ways. Try to make them take a picture of a laser and then say, "you are not on the moon! you are trick or treating!" when the laser image does not come up on tv film or what not...

How do you "Make" them take a picture when all the cameras were set for daylight conditions?

The laser would be undetectable by astronauts or cameras unless they took specific measures to attempt to detect it.

Patrick, since you refuse to answer any of my questions, I have very little interest in entertaining you any more.

 

[nomuse]

Actually as a writer and editor, that is exactly the sort of change I would make. The original sentence doesn't actually make sense - of course people knew where they were: they were on the friggin' moon. However, as the rewrite shows, no one knew exactly where they were.

I know clear communication is not your forte, but really this is a pretty weak argument. Even for you..

It is even subtler than that (far too subtle for Doctor Socks). The MOON wasn't where everyone thought it was. Short form; there is no common coordinate system for the Moon. There are several. NASA introduced at least one more of their own; a system built around the gravitational shape of the Moon and used to calculate trajectories.

Mapping coordinates to surface features is a non-trivial act. Planets are not perfect spheres. The "skin" of a topological map has to bend and stretch in order to adjust for divergences of the surface from the surface of this basic geometric shape.

Also, since there is no Greenwich, there is no bronze disc placed on the Moon from which all coordinate systems can be aligned. Each attempt to fit a coordinate system to the actual surface features involves best-fit attempts of the visual look of the terrain, as captured by various cameras at various angles and lighting (which one attempts to correct for, of course). Nor is there a central body; more than organization mapped the Moon and many of them picked arbitrary coordinate centers of their own -- and then each system had different approximations and different trade-offs in best fit for the data of the time.

 

[Oji]

It is even subtler than that (far too subtle for Doctor Socks). The MOON wasn't where everyone thought it was. Short form; there is no common coordinate system for the Moon. There are several. NASA introduced at least one more of their own; a system built around the gravitational shape of the Moon and used to calculate trajectories.

You mean that, in the real world, different people would calculate different coordinates for the same thing using different methods and coordinate systems...

 

[nomuse]

You mean that, in the real world, different people would calculate different coordinates for the same thing using different methods and coordinate systems...

Yah.

Blame waiting on my morning coffee to finish brewing!


I just...it doesn't matter for this exercise, but it annoys me when people seem to think a coordinate system has flaws because it was drawn up by idiots. Mapping will always contain compromise: compromises between readability, use-ability (not quite the same thing), accuracy to distance, to angle, to area, to skew, to surface normal (aka what is an "accurate" map of a mountain? One that is true to the footprint, or one that is true to the area?)

So I tend to rant about mapping when I should just say NASA was using at least two coordinate systems, and stop there!

 

[nomuse]

Oji: In the specific case of the Apollo Program, there were few detailed photographic studies of the Moon at that time. Surveyor and others made an effort to photograph potential landing spots (and began mapping the lunar mascons) and the CSM of the Apollo missions did the same. Plus the LM would take pictures on the way down. Otherwise, it was all Earth-based telescope studies.

Thus the topological maps of the time were a scattered and sometimes contradictory collage. Add to this, that an accurate surface map depends on an accurate geiod (or would that be a lunoid?) Which with the near-lack of radar ranging studies, was quite rough. So you had at the end a best-fit of scattered photographic data of topology best-fit to an estimate of the spheroid, given some arbitrary zero longitude (such as a nice visible near-side crater).

In the meanwhile, the various Apollo craft were using a combination of inertial reckoning and radar tracking. So in the total schema of things, the LM knew where the CSM was as an offset to a shared set of coordinates, Goldstone knew where the pair was as a tracking and calculated connection of their shared coordinates with a generalized space tracking coordinate system, and all three knew where the Moon was in two different ways; as a gravitational object to orbit, and as a set of mapped surface features with a mathematical relationship to that orbited object.

Its not even a hierarchy of accuracy; it is more like local variables in C++. The estimate the LM had of where the CSM was, was more accurate to within that frame of reference than any other estimate of either spacecraft's position. But it took a lot of work and some compromise and guesswork to match that up with any other determined location (such as, the "coordinates" of any specific terrain feature on the Moon).

Throughout the days of the mission (and for quite a few years following,) the work of relating these various estimates to each other and accounting for the differences continued.

But short form...Goldstone being unable to tell Lick "point at that crater over there" can not be taken as the LM being unable to say "The CSM is passing over us now."

 

[Oji]

So I tend to rant about mapping when I should just say NASA was using at least two coordinate systems, and stop there!

No it's good. One of the incidental benefits (the only benefit) of HB threads is all the new stuff you can learn. So thanks. (Also, I was actually being slightly ironic as Dr Sox seems to think that multiple estimates of position were a problem...)

 

[nomuse]

Heh. Me too. I mean...I had some background that allowed me to understand, but I was surprised to learn some of the vagaries of navigation and mapping involved. I think my first glimmering was a post long ago on another forum where an H.B. was talking about several different entries being given for the locations of the various LM, depending on which source you read. In that case, the largest source of error was over-reliance on secondary sources by two many writers (aka they copied a list that had an error in it, propagating it). But a large remaining "error" was that different lunar topological maps were being used by different sources in describing the locations.

Doctor Socks has been worth it for a couple things so far. I did not realize an Earth-located laser was theoretically capable of being seen by an observer on the Moon (and, yes, was seen by one "observer" specifically adjusted for that observation).

(Err...talking it over at lunch with a friend, we both realized we'd been leaving out of the equation that the human eye does not have a manual iris. You could adjust a camera so that the crescent Earth/lunar landscape/Sun were brutally over-exposed, but you don't have that option on the Mark I Eyeball. This means the conditions under which a human eye could see the laser are extremely rare. My friend jokingly suggested you wait for a lunar eclipse!)

I also had not realized abort following the TLI burn was possible. I thought the free-return trajectory was the only option at that stage. It doesn't look anything like "turn around and come back," of course, and doesn't look at all fun (edge-of-the-envelop return with no choice about where you land, anyone?)

But that's the major part of why I bother with the H.B.s Despite THEIR best efforts, you often end up learning something.

 

[Oji]

I did not realize an Earth-located laser was theoretically capable of being seen by an observer on the Moon (and, yes, was seen by one "observer" specifically adjusted for that observation).

Yep, that was surprising to me too! (And good point about eyes only operating in auto mode.)

 

[abaddon]

Hey there patrick.

You have yet to answer my question.

Got none?

 

[matt.tansy]

I also had not realized abort following the TLI burn was possible. I thought the free-return trajectory was the only option at that stage. It doesn't look anything like "turn around and come back," of course, and doesn't look at all fun (edge-of-the-envelop return with no choice about where you land, anyone?)

But that's the major part of why I bother with the H.B.s Despite THEIR best efforts, you often end up learning something.

Right! One thing I learned to appreciate a lot more was "gravity drag". I knew about it but never appreciated how vital it was to space travel. On another thread some HB couldn't comprehend that it takes 8 minutes to get into LEO, so 8 minutes of free fall was equivalent to x m/s, but only a small fraction of your delta-v has to be expended to counter that and most of your delta-v can be applied to horizontal acceleration.