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Post by Jairo on Oct 25, 2010 13:25:20 GMT -4
The Apollo program discovered many things about the Moon and space, things that would't be known with a fake program. I know some examples, like Aldrin's reported flashes with eyes closed, due to radiation; and the match between the Apollo 15 pictures and the 3D simulation from Selene's laser altimeter.
However, I know there are other things, perhaps about Moon geology and formation, that I'm not familiarized with. I'd like to know more to showcase them in foruns. Which do you know?
Thanks.
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Post by echnaton on Oct 25, 2010 17:14:04 GMT -4
Although the issue of meteorites has been discussed here several time, it bears repeating. Meteorites found in Antarctica were discovered to be from the moon through comparison to know moon rock samples.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Oct 25, 2010 19:35:01 GMT -4
The entire theory of moon formation was revamped with both the leading candidates of the time being rejected based on the lunar samples.
This is one of the major reasons I laugh when people claim the samples were fake. If NASA was to fake them they would have made rocks that agreed with the then conventional knowledge of lunar formation, not something that resulted in the textbook being thrown out and and rewritten. Scientists have a habit of looking much harder and closer at data that doesn't agree with their current theory because they want to know if it's the data or the theory that is wrong, yet HBs try and claim that in that climate, no one would have noticed the rocks were faked.
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Post by Jairo on Oct 25, 2010 19:38:28 GMT -4
Meteorites found in Antarctica were discovered to be from the moon through comparison to know moon rock samples. Interesting. They were confirmed by comparison with Apollo samples, but would that be the only way? |
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Post by PhantomWolf on Oct 25, 2010 19:50:01 GMT -4
Meteorites found in Antarctica were discovered to be from the moon through comparison to know moon rock samples. Interesting. They were confirmed by comparison with Apollo samples, but would that be the only way? They were matched with the Soviet samples too. Here's a good link about the subject: meteorites.wustl.edu/lunar/howdoweknow.htm |
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Post by lukepemberton on Oct 25, 2010 20:45:16 GMT -4
I'm not sure if this can be considered in the context of the orginal question, but laser ranging has certainly helped inform our understanding of geodescy. Huge steps have been made in this field thanks to the retroreflectors that were placed by the Apollo astronauts.
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Post by echnaton on Oct 26, 2010 7:09:17 GMT -4
Meteorites found in Antarctica were discovered to be from the moon through comparison to know moon rock samples. Interesting. They were confirmed by comparison with Apollo samples, but would that be the only way? I don't know if it is the only way the identification could have been made, but it was the way they were identified. |
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Post by ka9q on Oct 27, 2010 8:15:28 GMT -4
The entire theory of moon formation was revamped with both the leading candidates of the time being rejected based on the lunar samples. I believe there were three existing theories that were pushed aside in favor of the post-Apollo "giant impact" theory: Co-formation: the earth and moon formed together out of the same primordial cloud. Fission - the moon flew out of the earth, perhaps the Pacific Ocean basin. Capture - the moon was formed elsewhere and gravitationally captured by the earth when it ventured nearby. Yet in a sense the giant impactor theory actually incorporates elements of all three, plus more. Some of the major issues to be addressed by any theory of the moon's formation have to do with the relative compositions of the earth and moon (bulk density, size of metal core, isotope ratios) and the physics (conservation of energy, conservation of angular momentum) of a capture or fission process. One of the big problems with the capture theory is that there's no plausible mechanism for the moon to shed the necessary amount of angular momentum to remain in earth orbit. Objects approaching a planet or star from a great distance generally do so in escape trajectories. The earth, all by itself, has no mechanism to capture a moon that just happens to fly by. You'd need a third body with sufficient mass and in the right orbit and position to take enough of the approaching moon's energy to trap it in orbit, and as far as we know there was no such third body available to the earth. I don't think all of the nits have been worked out of the giant impact theory yet, but it is the best fit to all the available evidence. We even have a name for the impactor (Theia) and a pretty good idea where it came from: it formed, along with the earth and other planets, from the primordial nebula in the earth's orbit at the earth/sun L4 or L5 point. It turns out that objects are stable at L4/L5 only up to a certain mass; when they get too massive, they begin to oscillate around the stable point until, as in Theia's case, it eventually hit the earth. Computer simulations have shown that the physics can definitely work. |
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