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Post by lukepemberton on Nov 19, 2010 12:50:32 GMT -4
My other favorite Apollo pictures include the long shots from Apollo 17 showing the LM sitting on the plain a long distance away. Made me appreciate just how much confidence they had developed in their EMUs (suits & PLSS & OPS). When you put it like that, it makes you realise how brave they were. From the moment of launch to the moment they were back on the deck of a carrier, their journey was fraught with danger. Collins admits that while he was in lunar orbit, he spent some time thinking about what if the ascent stage failed and how he would have to make that awful journey home. Makes me even more cross when I think about those who accuse them of hoaxing it. I really find the attacks on the astronauts disgraceful. Claim distrust of NASA by all means, that is an opinion. To victimise and slander great men based on poor science and lack of humility is something else.
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Post by banjomd on Nov 19, 2010 13:31:29 GMT -4
. . . To victimise and slander great men based on poor science and lack of humility is something else. Well put.
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Post by dwight on Nov 19, 2010 15:34:00 GMT -4
I'd love a chance to see that exhibition again. Well, check out the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal! It doesn't have every Apollo photo in high resolution, but it has many of them. And quite a few have been joined into panoramas. You will need a big display (and some 3D glasses) to get the most from them, but they will knock your socks off. I never really had an idea of what it must be like to stand on the moon before I saw these more recent digital scans. Stare at them for a while and you just might start to feel like you're there. Then you'd like to have a look at this offer moonpans.com/posters/I have both and they are simply stunning!
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Post by theteacher on Nov 19, 2010 17:57:59 GMT -4
No. It is more than six times higher. I was a little busy when I threw the two links in my former post. I'll try to elaborate a little further: It is necessary to discern between idealized and real conditions to understand the matter. Let's compare a jump on the Earth and on the Moon by the same person and in the same clothing, jumping vertically with the same effort. After the spring-up phase on the Earth, the person leaves the ground at a certain speed. If he would leave the ground with the same speed, making the same jumping effort on the Moon, he would jump six times higher. But that is not the case. On the Moon he has to accelerate the same amount of mass as on Earth, but as the opposing gravity is six times less on the Moon, he will experience less resistance from gravity in the spring-up phase, and thus leave the ground with a higher speed than he did on the Earth, and as he leaves the ground at a higher speed, his jump will be correspondingly higher. Thus a vertical jump on the Moon will be much higher than six times that on Earth - all things apart from gravity being equal. But the real conditions are different. The suit and PLSS etc. are so heavy and the links in the inflated suit so restricting of movement, that the astronaut would not be able to leave the ground trying to perform a jump on the Earth. Multiplying zero with six yields zero, but we know, that astronauts can jump fairly high on the Moon, so this consideration once again proves, that the notion of "six times higher" is wrong as it rests on wrong premises.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Nov 19, 2010 19:20:05 GMT -4
But the real conditions are different. The suit and PLSS etc. are so heavy and the links in the inflated suit so restricting of movement, that the astronaut would not be able to leave the ground trying to perform a jump on the Earth. Multiplying zero with six yields zero, but we know, that astronauts can jump fairly high on the Moon, so this consideration once again proves, that the notion of "six times higher" is wrong as it rests on wrong premises. This is the real clanger. HBs say things like "People can jump 2 feet high on Earth so they should have been able to jump 12 feet high on the moon." They conveniently forget that people jumping 2 feet on Earth aren't wearing restrictive and heavy space suits. The real answer is higher than what? Most people would be lucky to get a more than few inches into the air on Earth while wearing a full Apollo suit, so the fact they did some quite big jumps (e.g. Armstrong's leap up onto the LM ladder) would indicate that they could jump more then 6 times the height they could on Earth.
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Post by ka9q on Nov 21, 2010 9:48:04 GMT -4
When you put it like that, it makes you realise how brave they were. From the moment of launch to the moment they were back on the deck of a carrier, their journey was fraught with danger. Yes. And before those spacecraft and EMUs flew in space, they were tested in vacuum chambers with elaborate safety and rescue provisions in the event of a sudden depressurization. That kind of help was a long way away when they were on the moon. Even today, if I could fly to the ISS I think depressurization would still be my main worry, at least once I got there. The place is now really big, with a lot of surface area exposed to space debris. Most of it is much tinier than a bullet, but moves tens of times faster than one. During the longer Apollo EVAs things worked so well that it was easy to forget how incredibly hostile the place really was. It may have looked like the high desert in the southwest US as Armstrong said, but that black sky meant that unprotected, they'd pass out in seconds and die in minutes. Charlie Duke talks about being abruptly reminded of this when he jumped and fell during an Apollo 16 EVA. Yet the skeptics now complain that the astronauts didn't jump 12 feet off the ground just to "prove" they were really on the moon.
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Post by capricorn1 on Jun 18, 2011 18:41:50 GMT -4
Okay, it can't be air moving the flag.......so what can it be. There appears to be a small movement when he's 2 feet away. I've studied this one quite a bit, and I conclude you're seeing video artifacts. First of all, the color TV system used by Apollo is quite different from the one used in the US until the recent switch to digital. There's only one camera tube, with a rotating color wheel in front that sequentially exposes each field to red, green and blue light. Except for this rotating filter, the signal coming out of the camera is essentially a standard black and white signal. Back on earth, the individual fields are recorded on a magnetic disk and read back to synthesize a NTSC (US color standard) image. Note what this means: the individual color components in each TV frame that you see (especially when still-framing) do not come from the same instant in time. That's why you so often see those colored artifacts in Apollo video, especially on rapidly moving objects (like the "confetti" during LM ascent). Second, the image you're seeing has been through an additional step of lossy digital compression. MPEG-2 (and all later schemes) code across several frames in time, looking for parts of each picture that remain the same so they don't have to be repeatedly transmitted. Combine all these artifacts and it's not at all surprising that you might, while still-framing a video, see what looks like something beginning to move before it actually started to move. Sorry to trawl this thread back to life....but I noticed a new video on youtube and wondered what people thought about it. It seems to refute the air movement as being the cause of the flag motion, and concurs with your assessment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4gbMT-Zs2YI still think there may be a cause for ground disturbance though.... but this one seems quite convincing.
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