Responding to Russell...was: Re: for BMJ and all other parochial lot re moon landing


I don't remember if I commented on this...see only at the bottom..

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx wrote:

Straydog wrote:
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx wrote:

Straydog wrote:
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx wrote:

Straydog wrote:
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, rrc wrote:

Kamal R. Prasad wrote:
This is a mail that I got regarding the moon landing. Note that while I do not dispute the
United States' achievements in space, these questions do remain unanswered to date
-and I would be more than glad to see valid responses to the same.

"Capricorn One" is the best Hollywood movie on such a phenomena
alongside with the little 007 snide in "Diamonds Are Forever".

'Nasa Mooned America' by Ralph Rene was a decent compilation of facts
(plus his conjectures) on the subject matter.

The basic weakness include the heating theory since radiant heating is
the only thing that can happen in the vacuum of space which would
inhibit anyone or one's film from getting rapidly cooked given the
reflective nature of the suits, equipment, etc.

The deleterious effects of the capsule's lack of significant shielding
from solar radiation, however, could have had a cancer causing
biomedical effect but which didn't appear in any of the astronauts 5-20
years after the missions.

Yeah, but to play devil's advocate, if they didn't go on the trip (Kamal's
view), then they wouldn't get cancer, either. Thus, no proof against
Kamal.

As for the anomolies, well... they do exist but only together, as a
set, do they make for a "Capricorn One" type of a fraud case. Could all
of those anomolies, have occurred, along with a 100% successful mission
with no technical glitches in the landing equipment, rover, orbiter,
cameras, etc? That's where I'd get a little suspicious.


But we're trying to discredit Kamal's "evidence" or "arguments" that the
trip never took place and all we got was faked evidence _for_ the trip.

I say --as I did before-- that the prism laser reflector array that they
left at a particular crater location (originally for laser pulse
earth-moon distance determination, IIRC) could almost be in the range of
affordability for an individual to build the equipment and find strong
echos from that location vs weak echos from everywhere else on the
face of
the moon orriented towards us. IIRC, all that is needed is a six-eight
inch well collimated reflecting telescope and something like a 100 mw gas
laser, and sensitive diode detector (maybe even a photomultiplier tube
and boxcar integrator and power pulse generator or Kerr cell light
chopper). Couple thousand bucks, maybe, and a few nights of clear sky.

Ahh, but the existence of a retroreflector array doesn't prove
men put it there.

Yeah, but then you would have to invoke more incredible theories (who put
an anomalous high reflectivity object there, and how did NASA guys figure
out the coordinates [and its supposed to be located somewhere specific] if
they were not responsible for putting it there]) such as little green men
(or women?) from Mars or wherever.

Playing devil's advocate, NASA could have landed it on a
secret unmanned lander like those that they used for early
Lunar exploration.

Well, that is still a meritable accomplishment: getting anything installed
on the moon's surface and have it be functional.

Yeah, but we did that and I don't think even Kamal
disputes the unmanned Lunar probes.


And, I just posted some Google research for Kamal's benefit.


My sense of the equipment required (from
a few decades as an amateur astronomer) would be that the
mounting required would be more like $12 K (such mounts
are available to amateur astronomers with the $$$; really nice
machining).

Well, I've had my nose in the back pages of Sky and Telescope and they got
pretty fancy scope packages for pretty cheap, computer drives, etc. Maybe
even made in China

Yes, those are fine for general viewing and impreesive for
the money, but for precision laser pointing, I'd think one
would need something better. The type I'm thinking about
was used to image the space station well enough to tell
what it was. The article was S&T a number of years back
now, probably about a decade ago IIRC.

Well, thinking about light coming back out of your eye (gedanken
experiment) and a high mag scope (say 500-1000X mag), means that you'd be
spraying laser light over maybe a 100 mile diameter spot. I've looked at
the moon in 250-300X and you can get down to single large craters. Crank
up with barlow lenses, maybe, and I'm not sure its such a hard deal.


Your suggestions for the rest of the equipment
might adequate.

Lasers from China, too?

It may already have been done.

Ham radio operators have bounced RF pulses off the moon since back in
1950s or so. Piece of cake if you have a couple thousand bucks. Even
cheaper if you use new computer-based weak signal detection (piece of
cake).

Yeah but the moon is a big target and a radio beam is fairly
wide. IIRC the spread of lasers used for lunar ranging are
a few hundred meters at the lunar surface and the target is
the order of a meter.

All depends on how you spread the light. Concave lenses will do it. I've
done in here in my "inner sanctum" with a laser lecture pointer and a
barlow lens. Some kind of zoom telephoto optics could really fine tune
that.

But the more you spread the light, the smaller the
return signal.

Well there is a tradeoff. I don't recall what the typical spreading figures are for lasers (not the diodes, but the tubes), but you don't want, for example, a one inch diameter spot landing on the moon because you'll never find it with the telescope that you'll want to use to see the reflected light. And, telescope power you would need to get a one inch spot to fill your field of view is going have to be like 100,000X (no resolution left) or maybe even more. So, you aim for maybe a 10-100 mile diameter spot on the moon over which you spray the laser light, and then have the same or different telescope with the same power to see all of that same 10-100 mile diameter area. Factor in surface irregularity induced dispersion and phase distortion induced interference (which messes up the coherency of the laser light) and scattering (i.e. most of thelight will scatter sideways and not back towards the origin) and overall reflection efficiency goes down quite a bit. Ergo, the prism
reflector array which was supposed to reflect most of the impinging light back to its source (just like those bright reflector signs out on country roads at night) with high efficiency and precision 'back-to-point-of-origin' reflection. I'm sure there are lots of algebra equations and numbers that can be plugged in to figure out what is needed to make the thing work.

But with ham radio VHF-UHF off the shelf hobby level stuff, its a piece of cake and you don't need anything but the intact moon and no jazzy stuff placed there by man or beast (or robot).

Cheers,
Russell


.