In one of the greatest  losses of information in human history, eclipsed only by the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, it seems that the original tapes containing recordings of the unconverted vide0 from the Apollo-11 mission have most likely been destroyed.   This probably occurred sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, although it has not been specifically confirmed that all copies were degaussed at the time, it is known that many tapes in the collection from the era were.

At this time, there remains a very slim chance that there may be some of the original M22 tapes, most likely the on-site duplicates, that may have escaped degaussing and are hidden away somewhere in the US, Guam or Australia.  Although, that seems at best, a very long shot.   More likely to have survived was at least one recording, a possibly two made at the Parkes observatory on a modified  Ampex VR-660 video tape recorder.   If this tape exists, it is most likely in the archives of either the US government or the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. However, thus far, efforts to locate these tapes has also proven fruitless.

There is, however, another potential source of at least some of the information lost during the scan conversion process, which could be of use in the efforts to restore the video recordings, or which at least could provide some additional record for posterity:  Still images.

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It’s amazing how hard conspiracy theorists will dig, looking for anything they can cling to as evidence of their pre-conceived notions.   Here’s a video which claims to prove the Apollo Program was a hoax because of the mention of “classified fiber optics” in the Westinghouse Lunar Television Camera manual.

Now the reality:

When Westinghouse was asked to design a television camera for the Apollo program, they faced a difficult technical problem.  In addition to having to transmit the images within a relatively narrow portion of the spacecraft’s bandwidth, they had to create a camera that would work in the extreme lighting conditions of the moon.   With no atmosphere to defuse light and provide some indirect illumination, the conditions could be extremely bright out in the open and extremely dark in shadows.  This required a camera with very high dynamic range, but at the same time, the camera had to be as simple and free of adjustment as possible.  Astronauts would be too busy with other things to adjust the settings on the television camera during operation.

These requirements exceeded commercial video cameras of the day, but it turned out Westinghouse did have a camera tube that would be perfect for the job.  The only problem is that the technology that would make this high dynamic range, automatically-adjusting camera possible was being used as part of a military project to develop low-light television cameras for remote surveillance and weapon guidance work.    As the Vietnam War increased in intensity, the US military was turning to advanced low-light optics to help locate the enemy in the dark.  Because of this, the technology was classified at the time.

Westinghouse was able to get permission to utilize this classified military technology in the lunar television camera.   Specifically, it was something called the “secondary electron conduction” tube, a specialized variety of vidcon tube that was the bleeding edge of military imaging technology of the day.   The classified system was more or less hidden in plain sight, as it was built into the lunar television camera but never really acknowledged to the public as being a classified system.   Of course, only a handfull of people would ever actually handle or use the television camera and even fewer would ever open it up to service it, so the secret was fairly safe.

As mentioned in the article “TV’s Longest Remote”:

Westinghouse supplied a lot of battle-hardened electronic gear to the Pentagon, including some small black and white television cameras for use on ships and helicopters. Westinghouse also had something that many companies didn’t at the time—a facility for fabricating custom integrated circuits solely for use by the company.

And to make the hand even more attractive, Westinghouse had created a very special television camera pickup tube; one that could run circles around conventional image orthicons and vidicons in terms of size, sensitivity, S/N and lag. This was the secondary electron conduction, or SEC, tube. It had an outstanding dynamic range and was so sensitive that, without stretching the truth too much, it could make pictures of the proverbial black cat in a coal bin at midnight.

And there was one other thing unique about this specialized television system – it used a “fiber optic face plate.”  Yes, a fiber optic-based optical adapter that channeled the light from the camera lens into the image sensing tube.    In 1969, the same year that the mission was launched, Westinghouse got permission to file for a public patent on the design.   The patent, which was granted in 1971 can be seen here.    Believe it or not, although the widespread use of optical fiber for high band width communications has only been widespread since the 1980’s, fiber optic technology has actually been around for much longer than that.

And there you have it.   A lot less to this whole  story than some might want to believe.

It just keeps getting lamer.

Sure, the Apollo missions were about expanding scientific knowledge, pushing the boundaries of exploration and going one past the Soviet Union in human space exploration, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t just a little bit of time for fun involved. Alan Shepperd famously hit a golf ball on the moon during Apollo 14.

I found this video quite funny. Jack Schmitt, an astronaut and geologist (the only formally trained scientist to visit the moon as part of the Apollo program) has finished with the mission objectives and is preparing to end the EVA. He has a geology hammer, which he won’t be needing anymore and he wants to throw it in the 1/6 gravity. This isn’t for any real reason, he just wants to, because it would be fun.

What I find so humorous is how he begs mission control like a kid in a store asking “mom, can I please please have one of these?”

I came across this video online.   I’m not sure whether to be humored or irritated by these kind of videos, but I suppose it’s both.   Like most conspiracy theory videos, the creator speaks in a very authoritative tone, like he knows everything and is schooling the public on the “Truth.”   Yet like in so many cases, this self-proclaimed expert on the truth seems to have no clue about the fundamentals of radio communications.

It’s not even like these are things that you need a Ph.D. in communications systems engineering to see this either.  Most of these errors are so fundamental that anyone with a ham radio technicians license (the lowest level) should know better.   It’s amazing anyone could be so sure of something based on evidence that they are so ignorant about.   Then again, conspiracy theorists tend to start off with a conclusion and only try to make the evidence fit as an afterthought.

Actually, this guy has made over a dozen videos on the moon landing “hoax” – all of which appear to contain similar basic errors. He must have a lot of time on his hands.

A few glaring errors:

Error Number 1: It was not Australia and only Australia that received television from the moon.  It was received at Goldstone in California and in Guam.  Anyone who had a suitable receiver and was on the portion of the earth facing the moon could receive it.   Other portions of the mission, as well as other Apollo missions transmitted television  and/or data that was received at Ascension Island, Madrid, Goldstone CA, Madagascar, Guam, Hawaii, Carnarvon Australia and elsewhere.    There were also tracking ships.

Of course, there were other stations in the world that were capable of receiving the transmissions, even if they did not do so in any official capacity.

Error Number 2: NASA does not and did not own the Parkes Observatory in Australia.  It was made avaliable by the gracious cooperation of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

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There’s certainly no shortage of independent confirmation of the Apollo missions.  From ham radio operators to the Jorell Bank Observatory, plenty of independent observers received the radio communications.   Others tracked the missions optically.   The missions relied on centers located in Madrid, Australia, California, Guam, Madagascar  and elsewhere to track and maintain communications with the spacecraft.   Since then, lunar samples, observations and data have been confirmed by independent scientists and other national space programs.

However, one mission stands out as having been confirmed more than any others.   Apollo-15, the third to touch down on the lunar surface and the first to use the Lunar Rover, has been imaged by at least three different space agencies.   Nasa took images of the area during the mission, and these images were confirmed as accurate by later probes including the DOD’s Clementine probe and probes sent by the European Space Agency, Indian Space Agency, Soviet Union and Japanese Space Agency.

At least three of the probes have had imaging capabilities of sufficient resolution to see traces of the mission activities.   The best images come from NASA’s LRO, the only spacecraft able to return images of a high enough resolution to recognize the equipment left behind.  However, Japan’s SELENE probe confirmed the profile of the area and imaged the “halo” caused by the engines of the LEM disturbing the lunar dust, which had been undisturbed for millions of years, causing the top most layer to have different reflectivity due to the time spent exposed to the solar winds and intense sun light.   SELENE also saw the outlines and shadows of equipment, but without high enough resolution to definitively tell they were man-made.

More recently, the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe provided slightly better images than SELENE, providing additional detail and confirming the observations already made by the two previous imaging missions.  This was announced in early September, but the images were not immediately avaliable.

The reason that I held back on posting on this is that the images were not avaliable and a number of websites erroneously  posted images that were supposedly showing the tracks of the Lunar Rover as seen by Chandrayaan-1.   The following image showed up on a number of websites and claimed to trace the path of the rover:

Unfortunately this image (which seems to have originated on Gizmodo – note the watermark.)   Is not what it seems.   It does show the general area where Apollo-15 landed, but it is actually a three-dimensional compost image of Chandrayaan-1 data and not a single image.   It also is not nearly high enough resolution to see the tracks of the rover.   The area highlighted in red is not even the path of the rover.   Rather, it appears to be an illusion caused by a string of craters and shadows in what looks like a continuous track, if you look hard enough.

The image does confirm the accuracy of the images and observations made by Apollo 15, but it does not show the tracks of the rover.  Based on NASA maps, if the tracks could be seen, they would look more like this:

For this reason, I elected to avoid this topic until the real images were avaliable.   Contributing to incorrect information, even if the information would seem to support a reasonable cause, does not help credibility and is really not acceptable.   However, the images and analysis are now avaliable from the Indian Space Agency and can be found in this PDF.

Now, onto the images…

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It has been mentioned here before that the landing of Apollo-11, as well as other Apollo missions were not only monitored by the official NASA communications and telemetry stations, but also by a number of amateur and professional facilities operating in an unofficial capacity. One of the most capable of these facilities was the Jodrell Bank Observatory in North West England.  Despite having one of the largest radio telescopes in the world, Jodrell Bank was not an official tracking station for NASA’s Apollo missions.   Instead, the European portion of the receiving network was located at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Center.

Jodrell Bank had, however, provided critical data reception and tracking for the Soviet Luna program.   Early on in the Soviet program, the Soviets lacked the capability to reliably receive the weak signals from the tiny probes and therefore had to rely on Jodrell Bank to provide tracking and reception capabilities – an uneasy relationship during the Cold War.   By 1969, however, the Soviets had upgraded their tracking stations and improved the transmitters on their lunar probes.   However, Jodrell Bank continued to track and observe Soviet probes even after its services were no longer critical to the program.   In 1969, The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell bank was the largest fully steerable antenna in the world (today it is the third) and thus was capable of providing greater signal gain than anything the United States or Soviet Union had.

On July 20 1969, the scientists at Jodrell Bank were simultaneously observing two dramatic events.    The Lovell Telescope, their largest, was receiving signals from the Soviet Luna-15 probe, which was supposed to land just hours after the Apollo 11 landing.   Rumors had been floating that Luna-15 carried a sample-return spacecraft that was intended to beat the US in getting the first lunar soil and rock samples back to earth.  Having had experience with the Luna program, the scientists at Jodrell Bank were very eager to see if the rumors were true and to observe the landing of Luna-15.

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You may know Bart Sibrel as the Apollo conspiracy theorist who got a well deserved punch in the face from Buzz Aldrin a few years ago. If you live in Nashville, you may also know him as the guy who drove you home from the bar, because his actual day job is driving a taxi cab there.

The first thing Sibrel said after being punched was “did you get that on tape?” to his camera man. Apparently he felt that the punch would make Buzz Aldrin seem like a dishonest or hot-headed person. Of course, it’s worth nothing that this happened after Subrel had been following Aldrin for much of the day, repeatedly getting in his face and refusing to listen to Buzz’s initially polite requests to leave him and his granddaughter alone.

But it seems that Sibrel himself has some issues with his temper. In his case, the thing that set him off wasn’t being stalked all day by a creepy guy with a video camera but a parking space.

Via News Five Nashville:

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Jupiter apparently took quite a hit from an asteroid, comet fragment or something else in space.  Nobody saw it coming, but we certainly can see the spectacular scar it has left on the planet.    The first signs of the impact were spotted just about a week ago, and since then there have been a number of photos taken by earth-based observatories.

The spectacular photo bellow was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.   The fact that this photo was taken goes to show how important NASA deemed this event.   Hubble was visited by the Space Shuttle this past may for an extensive servicing and systems upgrade. Since that mission, NASA has been going through the lengthy process of systems checks, calibration and testing the new sensors onboard Hubble.   Although they have not yet finished, NASA took a break from the calibration and testing schedule to take a few stunning images.

Our friend Phil Plait, “The Bad Astronomer” has some great info on this on his website and even more linked to it.

This is a little bit old as far as news goes (damn near a week out in the press) but it still is worth mentioning.   NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has beamed back a series of photographs showing the areas visited by manned missions during the Apollo project. The resolution is sufficient to clearly see the scientific items left behind by astronauts as well as the lunar module descent stages, which were left behind when the astronauts took off from the moon.

Although there have been a handful of unmanned probes to orbit the moon since the Apollo project, this is the first time that the images returned have been sufficiently high resolution to make out the small man-made structures.

Although the Apollo-11 site can be seen, it is not necessarily the most interesting site photographed by LRO.   Later missions included more equipment, such as the Lunar Rovers and ventured further from the landing site to explore the geology and topography of the moon.    The Apollo-14 site is especially interesting, as the photographs were taken during favorable lighting conditions which permit the recognition of astronaut’s footprints between the LM and some of the scientific experiments.

The entire series of photographs can be found here.

Of course this just adds to the mountains of proof that we actually did go to the moon.  (Yes, man walked on the moon, 40 years ago.  It happened.  Get over it.)  That being said, those who continue to cling to conspiracy theories will not likely be swayed by these images.   After all, it’s just proof that NASA is continuing to fake pictures, right?

Big bummer.

I received word from those involved in the preservation of records of the Apollo 11 broadcasts from tracking stations in Australia (Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek) which indicates that the story about the tapes being found is false.   According to a source involved in the archiving of data in Australia:

The UK journalist was engaged in a piece of “creative writing”

More info debunking this has appeared on the Twitter account of one of the officials at the NASA office of public affairs:   http://twitter.com/bnjacobs/

On a somewhat related note:  There is an ongoing effort to preserve the memories, photographs, film and other information on the efforts made in Australia and elsewhere to make the reception of Apollo-11 television transmissions possible.  I suggest checking out this website for volumes of fascinating information on the topic.

While it’s impossible to be absolutely sure that some other party has found the tapes, all indications from those involved at the moment are that the report was false.