|
Post by gwiz on Aug 11, 2011 7:17:32 GMT -4
Wouldn't it, in fact, speed up? It would speed up a little. However, the main factor is that because of the lower height, the angular rate that the scenery goes past is a lot higher. Unless there is some compensatory system on the LRO, this will give more blurring of the image for a given exposure time.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Aug 11, 2011 7:08:52 GMT -4
So the biggest claim about JW here, is that he said the astronauts were in "polar orbit" Not "biggest claim", but "biggest laugh". A polar orbit, like any other orbit, lies in a plane that goes through the centre of the Earth. What makes it polar is having that plane inclined at a large angle, close to a right angle, to the plane of the equator. The higher the orbital inclination, the more of the Earth a satellite's ground track passes over, so polar orbits are useful for Earth survey satellites. JW's polar orbit had a plane that didn't intersect the Earth at all, let alone the centre. It's ground track followed the Arctic Circle. There was more daftness about an infeasibly high orbital velocity, as well. He posted it, with a carefully drawn diagram, on the old Loose Change forum.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Aug 11, 2011 4:42:04 GMT -4
What's the point of trashing Jarrah if he has never personally said anything bad to you? Apart from the big laughs I get from things like his "polar orbit"? Seriously, as an aerospace engineer I find his accusations about the hoax to be personally insulting. He is effectively claiming that people like me lie about their competence.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Aug 10, 2011 10:04:16 GMT -4
Providing he's open to rational argument, you could start by pointing out all the third-party evidence backing NASA's claims. People all over the world were following the missions with radio and optical telescopes, the geologists were convinced by the returned lunar samples, etc. As to the technology, Apollo's been taught in aerospace engineering courses for the last four decades. All those lecturers, all those students, and never a one has spotted a problem with the technology. Then there's the fact that the Apollo record has stood up to some pretty obscure challenges, such as the Italian school project that derived the eccentricity of the Moon's orbit from the delay due to the speed of light in the Apollo transmissions, or the thread here where the challenge was to detect the planet Venus in the sky in Apollo Lunar photos. Finally, if Apollo was a hoax, why has NASA gone out of it's way to involve so many outsiders in the programme? Foreign investigators in the science teams, Australian and Spanish tracking sites, and most recently the LRO team mentioned in the third-party link above, were all given ample opportunity to discover anything fishy.
|
|
|
Juno
Aug 5, 2011 14:30:17 GMT -4
Post by gwiz on Aug 5, 2011 14:30:17 GMT -4
Juno is on its way to Jupiter. Hope it all goes well. Should be an interesting missions and hopefully one that answers lots of questions about Jupiter. Don't hold your breath, it'll take five years to get there.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 29, 2011 12:57:30 GMT -4
Following the tragic deaths of Ted Freedman and Elliot See, the prime crew of Gemini 9,... That's Charles Basset and Elliot See. Freeman, who was never assigned to a mission, was killed in a separate T-38 crash.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 24, 2011 5:06:14 GMT -4
Isn't Dragon supposed to go to ISS this year? On current plans, an unmanned flight to the ISS is scheduled for November. A manned version, however, could be several years away.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 21, 2011 7:14:48 GMT -4
Problem is asking highly qualified, busy people to examine what is likely to be junk science and asking them to explain to me where and why it is wrong. A few of those have passed across my desk over the years, mostly people trying to sell us their patents. The reply I was most proud of went along the lines of: Could you please try the following experiment with your apparatus and report the results to us: if your apparatus works as you claim, you should find that removing component AB17 should lead to the rest of your hardware spontaneously rising into the air.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 21, 2011 5:01:03 GMT -4
Someone raised the topic over on UM recently, and they did a pretty good job of showing where Podrovsky went wrong. It starts here.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 18, 2011 5:55:17 GMT -4
Actually, depending on your definition of 'earthshine'... light from the earth is in fact a rather notable feature of the most famous Apollo picture ever... I shall leave it to the avid reader to work out what I am referring to (a little mental exercise so that these threads are not a *total* waste)... I never noticed it until I first came across the hoax theory, perhaps 15 years ago. The "most famous picture" featured prominently in the claims, and that led me to digging out an old copy of Life magazine with a big enlargement of the area in question on the cover. Once I started looking at it, the fact that the Earth was there rather leaped out at me, and some examination of the geometry of the landing site and the photo convinced me that it was right where it should have been. Either Apollo was real or there had been a simply amazing attention to detail on the part of some faker.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 14, 2011 6:23:10 GMT -4
Give one example where he lied. My favourite is also an example of why "He's a joke". It must be about five years ago now, on the old Loose Change forum, he claimed that the Apollo lunar missions had actually spent their time in a 25,000 mph polar orbit. To back this up, he produced a diagram of his idea of what polar orbit is: an orbit that has a ground track following the Arctic Circle. Certainly one of the funniest claims I've ever seen a hoax proponent come up with. Presumably he must have subsequently realised how ridiculous this made him look, because he later claimed it was a cunning plan to confuse his opponents. That is lying to cover up a mistake.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 12, 2011 12:18:48 GMT -4
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 8, 2011 14:47:53 GMT -4
A halo orbit about the Earth-Moon L2 point would do the trick, though it wouldn't be stationary over a point on the moon, so would have to be tracked by the antenna on the moon and would occasionally be below the horizon for some places on the far side. There's a slight problem in that a halo orbit isn't stable, so needs the occasional tweak manoeuvre to maintain it. Such an orbit has recently been used for the first time by NASA's ARTEMIS P1 satellite, now in lunar orbit. I think that you are suggesting a similar set up to the SOHO. That sits at L1 in a halo orbit, and needs the occasional tweak manoeuvre to maintain it. I will sit corrected on this point by others more knowledgeable in practical orbital mechanics. That's exactly comparable, apart from SOHO's L1 point being in the Sun-Earth system, rather than the Earth-Moon system. There have been other satellites than SOHO that have used or are using halo orbits about the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 points. The sister satellite of ARTEMIS P1 (that's P2) is currently in a halo orbit about the Earth-Moon L1 point and will shortly be manoeuvred to join P1 in lunar orbit. Here's a link to what the ARTEMIS satellites have been doing: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/news/artemis-orbit.html
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jul 8, 2011 7:09:26 GMT -4
OK...I got a question for the real "geeks" out there... Is there such a thing as a "geolunar" orbit that would allow a single satellite to relay transmissions from the far side of the Moon to Earth? Perhaps something of a lunar version of the Molnaya (sp) orbit? Or a "way out there" Earth orbit? I've played with it on Orbiter, and the danged Earth gravity, needless to say, messes it up. A halo orbit about the Earth-Moon L2 point would do the trick, though it wouldn't be stationary over a point on the moon, so would have to be tracked by the antenna on the moon and would occasionally be below the horizon for some places on the far side. There's a slight problem in that a halo orbit isn't stable, so needs the occasional tweak manoeuvre to maintain it. Such an orbit has recently been used for the first time by NASA's ARTEMIS P1 satellite, now in lunar orbit.
|
|
|
Post by gwiz on Jun 29, 2011 14:42:54 GMT -4
I was just curious as to why the EVAs on the moon seem to coinside with high tides and low tides on earth. It seems that they started their EVAs when it was low tide (on Earth) and ended them at high tides. Did anybody ever wonder why? Can somebody extrapolate the location on earth where the times seem to coinside with the lunar EVAs so we can go take a look around. Seeing that it is always high tide somewhere on Earth and low tide somewhere else, this is hardly surprising. Just pick your spot. This only works for the later missions, of course, where the suits were improved to the point where an EVA lasted around half a tide cycle. For the earlier missions, the EVAs were much shorter, so you can't match both ends of an EVA to the same spot on Earth.
|
|