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Post by judmccranie on Mar 3, 2008 12:11:42 GMT -4
In the Apollo 15 video, a couple of minutes after they plant the flag, an astronaut walks past the flag (between it and the TV camera) and the flag moves a little. The astronaut doesn't appear to have been close enough to have touched the flag. What caused it to move?
(I searched for this and didn't find anything on it.)
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 3, 2008 12:54:17 GMT -4
Here are the various hypotheses:
1. The astronaut in fact does touch the flag. Photogrammetric analysis cannot rule out that, despite casual inspection, the astronaut is too far away from the flag not to have touched it.
2. Electrostatic attraction. Electrostatic effects are pronounced on the Moon, and many viewers believe they see the flag move before the astronaut passes it.
The conspiracists argue that wind currents from the passing astronaut are causing it to move, revealing that the scene is being shot in an atmosphere. However, no conspiracist has yet supplied proof that a nylon flag in such a situation would in fact behave as shown due simply to a passing human. In other words, they provide merely a supposition and have not duplicated the results according to their theory.
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Post by judmccranie on Mar 3, 2008 12:57:19 GMT -4
Here are the various hypotheses: The spacesuits vented water for cooling. Could this have done it?
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Post by Jason Thompson on Mar 3, 2008 13:08:48 GMT -4
As far as I know the water was continuously sublimated from a grille, not vented in little puffs, so that seems unlikely.
One thing to note about that video, however, is what happens to the flag after it starts to move. It keeps going for a very long time. Far longer than you would expect it to move in air.
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Post by echnaton on Mar 3, 2008 13:13:02 GMT -4
None of the proponents of the wind current theory have any answer to the questions of why the flag stays absolutely still when the astronauts are not interacting with it.
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Post by BertL on Mar 3, 2008 13:15:10 GMT -4
Also, to add to Jason Thompson's "HB argument flaw": as I've pointed out, the flag starts moving before the astronaut passes by. (Although, I must say that this is absolutely not conclusive proof. The photogrammetric analysis in this clip is very poor. I'm just pointing out what I see.)
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Post by judmccranie on Mar 3, 2008 13:46:33 GMT -4
None of the proponents of the wind current theory have any answer to the questions of why the flag stays absolutely still when the astronauts are not interacting with it. Right. Why does it stay still otherwise? It only moves when an astronaut affects it somehow. And I love it on A11 when you have > 30 minutes with the flag not moving, both on the TV and the 16mm!
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 3, 2008 13:51:06 GMT -4
The spacesuits vented water for cooling. Could this have done it?
I very much doubt it. The water was not "vented" in the sense of being of the same order of magnitude of release as, say, a waste water dump in a spacecraft.
The water was allowed to trickle at a very slow rate through a porous plate kept in the shade inside a vacuum-vented portion of the PLSS. There it froze into a cake of ice. A closed loop of water was passed through cold plates in this cake of ice, warming it to the point where it sublimated directly into the vacuum. It was replaced by ice formed by more water through the plate.
The density, rate, and velocity of this gaseous water passing from the rear grille of the PLSS and dispersing in all directions simply would not be enough to have a noticeable mechanical effect. In fact, I can't even get the effect to occur in air at my altitude (approximately 4,000 ft. above sea level) with air eddies I generate by walking through it.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 3, 2008 13:56:15 GMT -4
Right. Why does it stay still otherwise?
Conversely I took a similar flag out to the Mojave Desert. The problem is getting the darn thing to stay still at all. When we were filming, there was not a single instant in which the flag was still. And at one point a gust of wind grabbed the assembly and sent it hurtling across the desert floor, "ruining" a take.
The behavior of the flag in the Apollo video is utterly inconsistent with the behavior of such a flag in an exterior location.
And again, the conspiracists are very verbose in telling us how they believe the flag should behave in air and how it should behave differently in a vacuum. But handwaving prediction is not proof. Not one conspiracy theorist seems to have taken the trouble to create a demonstration that shows they can correctly predict the behavior of a 3x5 nylon flag retained along its top edge and bottom inside corner and subjected to both normal and special ambient air movement.
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Post by judmccranie on Mar 3, 2008 14:51:10 GMT -4
And again, the conspiracists are very verbose in telling us how they believe the flag should behave in air and how it should behave differently in a vacuum. That's the way it is with a lot of things, stars in the photos, etc.
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Post by AtomicDog on Mar 3, 2008 15:21:59 GMT -4
HBs don't seem to appreciate how windy the desert actually is.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 3, 2008 16:51:29 GMT -4
I'm surprised how many people say the Moon landings must have been filmed in the Nevada desert, who have never been to Nevada.
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Post by judmccranie on Mar 3, 2008 17:41:49 GMT -4
I'm surprised how many people say the Moon landings must have been filmed in the Nevada desert, who have never been to Nevada. In the film "The Shadow of the Moon", I think Alan Bean mentions Arizona instead.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 3, 2008 18:57:33 GMT -4
Arizona comes up because NASA built a scale model of Tranquility Base there by blowing craters in the desert floor with explosives in the appropriate spatial arrangement. Then they flew the crews over in a light airplane to help them familiarize themselves with the landing site in as large a scale as was possible, and in three dimensions. This gave rise to the conspiracist claim that this training aid was in fact the actual filming location for the ground scenes.
The other areas most commonly claimed are Area 51 (Nevada), Norton AFB, and Edwards AFB (California). The location we chose was the Trona Pinnacles near Ridgecrest, Calif., in the same desert environment as Edwards AFB.
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Post by Ginnie on Mar 3, 2008 19:43:54 GMT -4
I'm surprised how many people say the Moon landings must have been filmed in the Nevada desert, who have never been to Nevada. I've never been to Nevada. But in Newfoundland it is so windy in some places that just the sound of the flag waving would be deafening!
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