Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The hi-res Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s camera captured a pretty cool image of a (what I’m guessing is an ancient) landslide on the Moon. Check this out:

[Click to embrobdingnangate.]

The slide is down the steep slope of a crater called Marius, located in Oceanus Procellarum, a vast smooth-surfaced area on the Moon (generally called "maria" — singular is "mare" — and easily visible to the naked eye). The crater itself is pretty old; the floor is covered with the same smooth surface as the mare around it, so it predates Oceanus Procellarum which we know is pretty frakkin’ old.

The slide is very interesting; what could have caused it? A moonquake, or a nearby impact? Either way, the ground shook, knocking loose rubble at the crater rim which then rolled downhill. And just to give you an idea of the scale here, the image is 510 meters across: you could walk that distance in a few minutes. The fingers of debris are only a few dozen meters across at most! The smallest objects you can see in this image are less than a meter across.

Features like this on the Moon yield a lot of information. Better, as the LROC page notes, this feature can be compared to similar ones on Mars, giving scientists insight into both worlds.

And? It’s just really cool. Landslides on the Moon! Look out below!

When NASA slammed the 700 kg (1500 pound) 2400 kg (5200 pound) Centaur rocket booster into the Moon on October 9, the hope was that it would make a plume visible from Earth. Terrestrials were disappointed, however, when none was seen.

However, a better view was to be had by LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Sensing and Observation spacecraft, which shepherded and closely followed the rocket booster, impacting itself just minutes later. From its much closer (and doomed) location it spotted both the plume and the flash of impact! Here’s the plume:

I’ll be honest with you, it’s not much to see. For some reason, the plume was not several kilometers high as hoped, but instead more like only one or maybe two (and, it seems, blocked from our Earthly view by the rim of a crater). In the above image, taken 15 seconds after the booster impact, the plume was 6-8 kilometers wide. The fact that it was not as bright as hoped is itself interesting, however! The actual plume brightness was at the low end of what was expected, which may be due to the nature of the material it slammed into.

There was never really a chance to see the flash from Earth, since it was at the bottom of a crater blocked from our view. But LCROSS was directly above the crater when the Centaur hit, and took several images, including the one shown here right at the moment of impact. This image shows the flash in the mid-infrared, beyond what our eyes can see but where a lot of the energy of the impact went. Other images can be found on the NASA site.

The crater carved out by the Centaur was less than 30 meters across. That’s far too small to be seen from Earth (our limit, even with Hubble, is more than 100 meters in size), but the orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should be able to see it easily, and in fact did take observations of the impact just a minute or so after it happened.

All of these data are being analyzed right now. Did any of those instruments see the signature of water in the plume? Did the much larger LCROSS impact (it had a mass of 2000 kg) dig up any water? No one’s telling right now, but I suspect we’ll know soon enough. You can read more about this at Universe Today.

Update: Somehow, in my head, I got the masses of LCROSS and the Centaur reversed. Apologies, and thanks to IVAN3MAN for correcting me!

The instant I saw the avalanche image from the HiRISE camera on-board MRO orbiting Mars, I knew I would have a contender for my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.

But then they released this one at the same time:

Yeah, that’s us. That’s home. We were 192 million kilometers (115 million miles) from Mars when HiRISE turned around and took this picture. Right away I could tell that was South America’s west coastline… which is incredible. I also was just starting to wonder about the Moon in the image when I read that it had been brightened artificially to make it easier to see; in general the Earth is 3-4 times more reflective than the Moon, so it’s a lot brighter.

The Mars-Earth-Sun angle was just about 90 degrees when this was taken, which is why the Earth and Moon are half-full. Note that in reality, the Moon is about 30 Earth-diameters away from the Earth, so we’re seeing some perspective here. The Moon was a day before third quarter when this was taken, so it was actually a bit closer to Mars than the Earth was when HiRISE snapped this picture.

Beautiful.

Richard Hoagland, perhaps long ago sensing failure in his "Face on Mars" scheme, started downplaying it in favor of the ridiculous (and easily debunked) "City" on Mars, which then led to his totally over-the-top dumbosity of hyperdimensional physics. All of this, of course, fits (although "jammed-in-to-make-it-fit" would describe it better) into his over-blown conspiracy theory that NASA is Doing Nefarious Things.

RCH’s latest silliness is a book called Dark Mission. In the book, he and his cohort Mike Bara are making the same tired and painfully silly claims that NASA is hiding evidence of alien bases on the Moon, artifacts on Mars, conspiracies that go All The Way To The Top, yadda yadda. He also has a website describing it. Now, if I were to make a website to promote a book, I would take some of the best bits of the book and put them on the site.

Well, if the stuff on the site indeed represents the best examples from the book, I have to assume the rest of the book should have a toxic waste warning. It’s so profoundly goofy that it’s difficult to know where to start. Happily, Hoagland and Bara give me an excellent place to start debunking their goofiness: right on the very first page of the site.

If you go to the Dark Mission website (WARNING: extreme danger for brain cells!), the first image you see is this one:

This image shows astronaut Al Bean from Apollo 12 carrying the ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package). Hoagland cranked the contrast way up to show fainter features. See the pentagonal-shaped glow around Bean? On his website, Hoagland claims that this is actually "a massive tier of ‘glass-like ruins’", indicating — in his mind — that there is evidence of alien artifacts on the Moon. Bara makes this same ridiculous claim elsewhere.

Ignoring for a moment the overwhelmingly obvious problem of being able to see the lines of the pentagon in front of the astronaut — how massive can it be, if it’s between Bean and Pete Conrad (who took the picture)? — and also ignoring the obvious problem that this claim is bug-nut crazy, there is maybe a simple explanation.

The Hasselblad cameras used on Apollo had an iris inside, much like the one in your eye. It can open and close an aperture to let in more or less light. Guess what shape that aperture was? Yup: pentagonal.

That’s no glass ruin. It’s an internal reflection, inside the camera itself.

Mind you, this is the very first picture on Hoagland and Bara’s Dark Mission website. This gives you an idea of just how ridiculous this stuff is. They literally can’t even get the first thing right.

Note added December 18: Some commenters below have noted that in the book, it’s the vertical streamers in the background of the image that Hoagland and Bara cite as evidence for structures on the Moon (and also they do say the pentagon is an internal reflection). That is not at all clear from the page on RCH’s site to which I link, but that’s fine: the streamers are no more evidence of a structure than the pentagon is. Think of it: any structure bigger than a few hundred meters across is easily visible in a telescope, and it escapes me how a giant structure miles across would not have been seen hundreds of years ago by eager astronomers. Oh wait, it doesn’t escape me: Hoagland and Bara are wrong, and are amplifying defects in the images well beyond what is reasonable. This is their standard MO for such things. I stand corrected on the pentagon, but I still say they are dead wrong on just about everything else. And as I note near the bottom of this page; Hoagland is capable of actual image analysis when it suits his cause, but then turns around and does the most ridiculous image manipulation when it suits him as well. I leave it to the reader to draw their conclusions about him from that.

I could go on (and on and on and on), but why bother? Hoagland and Bara, as usual, never come within a glancing blow of reality. Going through the website (gah, the things I do for you BABloggees) is a seemingly endless mind-numbing journey through antiscience claptrap and truly awful claims. Not that I need to tell anyone here, but reading it is likely to melt your brain. You’d be closer to reality watching a few hours of Jerry Springer.

Did you know Hoagland and Bara actually held a press conference for the book? According to Dwayne Day at The Space Review, not only was it a flop, but it showed just how egregious these guys are. You should read Dwayne’s article; it’s great for a schadenfreude laugh or three.

I’m quite sure Hoagland and Bara will do a tour, going to UFO conventions and psychic fares to peddle their bunkum, just as I am quite sure there will be an eager audience lapping it up. Nonsense never ends, my friends. Happily, though, the truth really is out there.