Extremely high-res outtakes from Apollo 11’s 1969 moon landing

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

So you are going to buy that a foot from a gentle foostep can leave a marginally sized print, with actual visible displacement in the soil and from a photograph mind you.

Yet a craft much heavier lands and not even a hint of motion around the entire area? Not even around the foundations on the landing pads?

Why aren't there trail marks, where the legs would have slid during the landing. Astronauts don't land square and stop moving, they recoils to catch themselves because of lack of friction. Did the craft simply land flat? When in every training simulation videos, they never seem to be able to do. They struggle to level the craft then I'll thruster when the are as close to and as flat relative to the ground.

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
To be fair they have, but a lot of the ones at the ALSJ (and the Apollo Image Atlas) are not always of the best quality.

That's why I prefer the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Most of the high resolution photos on that Flickr account come from there.

I have been using it for years.

originally posted by: odzeandennz
Yet a craft much heavier lands and not even a hint of motion around the entire area? Not even around the foundations on the landing pads?

Look at this photo.

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: odzeandennz
Yet a craft much heavier lands and not even a hint of motion around the entire area? Not even around the foundations on the landing pads?

Look at this photo.

And these two as well. You can see the "ray lines" in the surface where the dust was blow aside:



Link to full size image AS11-40-5921

a reply to: odzeandennz

Aldrin's footprint photto was deliberately firm in order to show the behaviour of the soil under compression.

Three the LM feet had a contact probe on the end and these were bent on landing. If you look at the images of those feet in magazine 40 you can see that dirt is displaced over those contact probes and that the ground is flattened around the feet. There are also images in that magazine showing scouring and discolouration under the engine bell.

You can compare the state of the ground and how much motion there was with the landing footage:

Given we have high quality resolution available for monitors... you know what? Just forget it. Happy birthday or whatever, you damn liars!

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Given we have high quality resolution available for monitors...

Sorry, but I don't understand what one thing has to do with the other.

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Given we have high quality resolution available for monitors...

Sorry, but I don't understand what one thing has to do with the other.

Well that is your problem not mine. Suffice to say that even today we are faced with a select barrage of s*** photos when in fact such quality was always available.

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Well that is your problem not mine.

Yes, it's my problem, but as we are on a discussion forum I was expecting you could help me understand what you meant.

Suffice to say that even today we are faced with a select barrage of s*** photos when in fact such quality was always available.

Could you be clearer about what you mean? What are you calling "s*** photos"? What do you mean by "such quality"?

A clear answer would be appreciated.

originally posted by: GBP/JPY
Friggin no dust at friggin all on the pads

Here's some dust on the pads.

I think the problem is people have come to think real life SPACE doesn't look like they've grown accustomed to in film and television.

Truth is. Hollywood gets it mostly all wrong.

originally posted by: wildespace

originally posted by: GBP/JPY
Friggin no dust at friggin all on the pads

Here's some dust on the pads.

I wonder how much of that was kicked there by the astronauts working around it.

I bet the pads were mostly clean right after landing because most of the dust was being blown outward, and as I mentioned above, the engines shut down before the pads were on the surface. However, I do suspect there was some dust, especially if the LM landed a bit wonky and had one pad dig into the top dust layer, flicking up some of that dust.

originally posted by: Jonjonj

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Given we have high quality resolution available for monitors...

Sorry, but I don't understand what one thing has to do with the other.

Well that is your problem not mine. Suffice to say that even today we are faced with a select barrage of s*** photos when in fact such quality was always available.

I'm not sure what you mean by "select", because I think practically every Apollo image ever taken is available online.


There's this Flickr library with thousands of image from which you can download scans that of at least 4175px X 4175px at 300 dpi:
www.flickr.com...

There's also this library, which includes relatively high-res scans of the original negatives:
history.nasa.gov...


Here's another site, but the quality of the scans is not as good. However, I often use this site first, because it has thumbnails that I can quickly view. Then once I see the image I want, I go to one of those other sites I listed above:
www.lpi.usra.edu...

I might be wrong, but I think you can buy a CD from NASA with every Apollo image on it. If so, I don't know what the resolution is (if its any higher-res than the 300 dpi 4175 x 4175 pixels in the flickr library)


There are literally tens of thousands of Apollo images available in the public domain online. Maybe not all in "ultra-large format" scans, but with tens of thousands of images, I wouldn't expect all of them to have been uploaded to the internet in very large format scans.

originally posted by: odzeandennz
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

So you are going to buy that a foot from a gentle foostep can leave a marginally sized print, with actual visible displacement in the soil and from a photograph mind you.

Yet a craft much heavier lands and not even a hint of motion around the entire area? Not even around the foundations on the landing pads?

Why aren't there trail marks, where the legs would have slid during the landing. Astronauts don't land square and stop moving, they recoils to catch themselves because of lack of friction. Did the craft simply land flat? When in every training simulation videos, they never seem to be able to do. They struggle to level the craft then I'll thruster when the are as close to and as flat relative to the ground.

In space, a nuke going off right next to an object will not harm it. It has to be touching in order to have an effect. (other than radiation effect perhaps)

So the big heavy think with thrusters isn't gonna behave, or interact with its environment, the same way as on Earth. On earth the thruster is having an effect on the huge mass of air under it and surrounding it, even a helicopter creates a veritable wind storm. On the moon, the stuff coming out of those thrusters IS the only air or "atmosphere" and it immediately dissipates, it doesn't have force on a long line of molecules, each one pushing the one in front of it. The only force on the surface is each molecule of propellant that hits the ground, by the time it hits the ground it's disipated enough so that its just a lone molecule at a time hitting the ground... not a lot of force. I'm sure some grains got displaced though. A few millimeters.

The legs with landing pads at the end, were already in a low gravity environment, and they used retro thrusters to soften the landing, so...

Does anyone know what speed they were going at the time of impact? Or how many pounds of force per square inch or something?

I'm sure there were "pad prints" under the lander, just like the astronauts left their boot prints. I am sure dust was "displaced"...

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Good point, there are boot prints all over near that pad.


Oh, and btw, I think we went to the moon 👍🏼 And I consider myself a pretty hardcore conspiracy guy. Sometimes.

originally posted by: 3n19m470

Does anyone know what speed they were going at the time of impact? Or how many pounds of force per square inch or something?

I'm sure there were "pad prints" under the lander, just like the astronauts left their boot prints. I am sure dust was "displaced"...

Not fast - again look at the various 'pdi to touchdown' videos there are and you can see how slowly they're going. The lander legs were designed to compress on touchdown, but in Apollo 11's case the landing was so light they hardly compressed at all. Later missions tried to make theirs come down with more of a thump so they wouldn't have such a big jump up the ladder.

The videos (I posted Apollo 11's earlier) have the lunar module pilot (who didn't actually do the landing) reading out the rate of descent and how much drift they were experiencing ("Four forward, down two and a half" etc).

They could not afford too much lateral drift - they would risk tipping over.

In fact, the thruster on the descent stage launched the lunar dust very far away from the landing spot. science.nasa.gov...

Here on Earth, no one pays much heed to dust or sand blasted out by a rocket launch because "atmospheric drag rapidly slows the lightweight particles so they fall harmlessly to the ground a few meters from the blast," he explains. But on the Moon? "There is no atmosphere to slow tiny particles." Small grit can travel enormous distances at high speeds, scouring everything in its path.
[...]
Dust particles accelerated by a rocket's exhaust could theoretically travel all the way around the Moon!

Metzger's team has analyzed how the impact craters formed on Surveyor 3 and finds that the particles must have been traveling at least 400 to 1,000 meters per second.

And from www.space.com...

New research has revealed the seemingly gentle touchdowns of the six Apollo Lunar Modules (LMs) on the moon between 1969 and 1972 were actually incredibly violent events.

The Lunar Module's descent engine blew out high-velocity lunar particles that strafed the landscape.

"The smallest particles were seen by the Apollo astronauts to fly right out over the horizon and keep on going," said Philip Metzger of NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). "Depending on the actual velocity they may have gone halfway around the moon or more. In most cases they would only travel until they hit a natural terrain feature, such as a crater rim or a mountain range."

These minute specks of lunar dust are estimated to have been propelled at speeds of between 0.6and 1.5 miles per second (up to 5,400 mph or 8,690 kph). That's nearly fast enough to escape the moon's gravity and enter orbit around the sun.

There would simply be no dust hanging around to settle on the pads.

originally posted by: 3n19m470
In space, a nuke going off right next to an object will not harm it.

I'm sorry but I'll have to correct you there. A nuclear (and especially thermonuclear) explosion creates temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun, in addition to intense gamma and X-ray radiation. Those things are perfectly capable of travelling through vacuum and disintegrating you into carbon particles. If that doesn't kill you, nuclear space explosions produce an expanding ball of plasma and a strong EM impulse.

Trust me, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near a nuclear space explosion.

www.youtube.com...

To get back on topic (and because I love making three consecutive posts :-p ) here are some of my favourite Apollo outtakes:

a reply to: EternalShadow

I'm not buying the light or the horizon.

The LEM (Lunar Module) was made of thin highly reflective aluminum. The bottom half was covered in aluminumized
mylar insulation

These surfaces acted like a mirror reflecting the sunlight and lighting up the scene