Comments on: … and the flag was still there

By: H1N1 FTW - Friggin Abandoned

H1N1 FTW - Friggin Abandoned — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:00:46 +0000

[...] let’s go back to the moon, for a while. This awesome new image shows even the flag! Or something that could theoretically be the flag. [...]

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:47:19 +0000

GEOLUNA, you are right, and I corrected it. Thanks!

By: OrbitalHub » Carnival of Space #127

OrbitalHub » Carnival of Space #127 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:16:19 +0000

[...] posts cover topics like the Ares I-X flight, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently orbiting the Moon just 50 km off the surface, the HiRISE view of Phoenix in the Martian spring, armadas of robots exploring distant planets, the [...]

By: GEOLUNA

GEOLUNA — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:43:15 +0000

Apologies, but it’s Harrison Schmitt, not Schmidt, as commonly misspelled.

Cheers!

By: T.E.L.

T.E.L. — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:19:58 +0000

Jack, that’s all true, especially about Surveyor’s weight limits. But about lasers particularly, remember that surely they were on their way up in power fast enough for someone to think an array was worth putting aboard Apollo 11, which went up just a year and a half after the last Surveyor.

By: Jack Hagerty

Jack Hagerty — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:54:56 +0000

95. T.E.L. Says: “I’m surprised that NASA never put an array aboard one of the Surveyors.”

Outside of the weight limitations (the Surveyors were launched on an Atlas-Agena which has enough trouble just getting an empty payload shroud to the moon!), remember that when the Surveyor design was frozen, lasers had only been in existence for about five years. They were still pretty much laboratory devices with a maximum power in the unitary Watt, or maybe tens of Watts range. On the Mythbusters moon hoax show, the boys visited an observatory to watch as they pinged one of the reflector arrays. IIRC, they astronomer said that it took a megawatt level laser, concentrated through a large telescope, to pump out enough photos to have a detectable number make it back.

- Jack

By: T.E.L.

T.E.L. — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:49:51 +0000

toasterhead,

I know what you’re saying, but I don’t think any peripheral effort is being made to snap the landing site pics. The satellite’s job is to photograph the whole surface, which as a bonus must include the landing sites.