Thursday, February 8, 2007

The Moon Hoax:The Real Scientific Facts


So I was looking at information about the moon, and decided to google it. What I came up with were tons of articles about "the moon hoax" in which a whole bunch of people believe we didn't walk on the moon! Apparently some people believe that it was all a hoax to appear to be ahead of Russia in the space program. Interesting. Well, I decided to look at what they thought was fake and find out the scientific reasoning to explain the answers! Here's a site that tries to explain the science behind the confusion. All the buzz about the Moon began on February 15th, 2001 when Fox television aired a program called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? And people believed it.



What is the scientific facts that back up the claim that Astronauts did walk on the moon?

1. People thought the pictures were fake because there were no stars in the sky and film couldn't survive the vaccuum and heat.

-Have you ever taken a picture of the moon or tried to photograph the milky way on a clear night? The moon gets so small in the picture that you can barely see it, and you can never see the stars. Why? Because most of the photos were in bright light to show the astronaut in the picture, which washes out the stars in the background. Your camera must also be set where the shutter stays open for a long time. If you've ever had a camera that takes pictures in very low light, you know that it must stay very still for a long time so that the film can pick up more light. If they were to get the stars in the background, the astronaut would have looked very fuzzy. See Astrophotography for taking pictures of night stars. It can be done, but not with anyone else that moves at all in the picture! And here's a site that tells about the camera used on the moon and the special film and equipment they used.

2. People don't believe that the moon buggy could have fit in the landing module.


-Come on people, with the technology these days, we can fit anything anywhere with a little ingenuity. This cool little buggy folds up like a lawn chair. The "Lunar Roving Vehicle" (LRV) folded up into a very small package to fit into the pie-shaped confines of Quad 1 of the lunar module...which was about the size of a large suitcase. Nowadays students can compete in a Great Moonbuggy Race on earth where they require the buggy built to fold up into a 4 foot cube.

3. People think that someone had to be running the camera that followed the path of the lunar module back into the sky.

-Once again, people have no faith in technology. A lunar rover equipped with a camera was left on the surface of the moon to photograph the various surfaces of the moon, and could be controlled from Earth! Check out this cool Rover they used to explore the Kiluea Caldera!
4. People think that the American Flag couldn't have been waving in the wind because there is no wind.

-NASA astronauts and experts thought of this fact before they landed on the moon, so they put a horizonal bar at the top to hold the flag out. You can see from the picture that there is a bar at the top. And of course, in space, the flag rippled after the astronauts put it in the ground because there is no force acting against it, so it will continue to ripple a lot longer than it would on earth!


There are a lot more claims that it was a hoax, and you can check out the theories here. So what do you think? Do you believe that the landing was real or a hoax? It's easy to think of it as a conspiracy, because with technology these days, they can really fake a lot with the right facts and information.

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