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Founded January 1970
Julian Date: 2458830.16
2019-2020: LXX
"If at first you don't succeed....so much for
skydiving."
-Henny Youngman
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Meanwhile in the Moon Hoax Drama
[image:
NASA-fake-moon-landing-Stanley-Kubrick-apollo-11-conspiracy-Jay-Weidner-1076599.jpg]
Honestly, I'm just an astronomical disc jockey.
I sit here in my rackety old TARDIS and marvel at this inexplicable
physical reality just like everyone else.
I mention this status position -or lack, thereof- as a preface to today's
article as I was asked for my opinion about a scientific matter. Feel free
to take my explanation with a fistful of salt.
This morning a missive emerged out of the aether that included an article
written by an anonymous author from Rochester, NY. This article
pertains to the "Moon Hoax," the notion that humans never actually landed
on the moon, but, instead, were merely acting on a soundstage under the
direction of Stanley Kubrick, or something ingenuous.
I am devoting today's DA to this anonymous article and my response.
Like all conspiracy theories, the Moon Hoax conspiracy has the half life of
krypton-78, and so will persist for quite awhile.
Perhaps that is ultimately to our benefit, for it helps to keep the moon
landings in the public consciousness, even though the last people left the
moon in 1972.
*FROM ANONYMOUS:*
Well, here is the where and why I started to look at this: For years
there have been many people who have questioned NASA's claim of going to
the moon. After many years of looking at this, I too have become
skeptical of nasa's claim. I think the skeptics are correct, however I
have found a lot of their arguments to be rather weak. There is the thing
about the flag blowing on the moon - I don't see the flag moving. Then
there are those that say the shadows on the moon are not parallel, and
therefore they must have used an artificial light source -- the problem
with this is that the surface of the moon is not flat and so the shadow
argument never did much for me either.
I have always felt that if NASA didn't go to the moon, then there
ought to be something blatant and plane to see -- there ought to be
something so obvious, a mistake made, an oversight, something glaring,
something right in front of everyone's eyes, but nobody bothered to do the
calculations and figure it out -- perhaps there was something in the math
of it all, such that a person could say, "There it is, right there, that
proves it, etc." I have always looked for an undeniable proof that is
blatant and as plane to see.
[Note: If I seem to have drifted off topic, please bear with me... I'll
pull it all together shortly: I have come to believe that a) it is not
possible to go to the moon and return alive, or b) the moon is not
anything like what we have been led to believe it is, or it's location is
not where we have been led to believe.
Recently I have become aware of a thing called a barycenter. I
understand this to be the center of gravity of two objects. So if the
earth and the moon had the same mass, their barycenter would be in the
middle of the two. However it is said that the barycenter of the Earth
and the moon is something like 1000 kilometers under the surface of the
Earth. Well the moon is said to be about 250,000 miles from Earth. So
in order for the barycenter to be somewhere within the Earth the mass of
the moon would have to be just a fraction of the Earth's mass. And that
is exactly what some sources say - they say the mass of the moon is 1/87th
the mass of the Earth. Well ok, I guess that would make sense except then
why is it that they say the gravity on the moon is 1/6th that of Earth.
If the mass of the moon is 1/87th that of Earth, then shouldn't the
gravity on the moon be 1/87th that of the Earth ( perhaps divided by 2 but
still it is not even close to 1/6th ). If the gravity on the moon was
1/87th that of Earth then the astronauts would have had trouble staying on
the surface - they would have been able to jump 50 or 60 feet into the air
without even really trying.
So, if you ask me, something just does not add up here. If the
moon is 250,000 miles away, and the bericenter is within the Earth, then
the mass of the moon would need to be much less that previously thought...
What they did film does fit the 1/6th gravity scenario, but it looks like
the claim that gravity on the moon is 1/6th that of Earth does not make any
sense.
What do you say?
*DA:*
Hello
I would say
g = G M r 2 {\displaystyle g={\frac {GM}{r^{2}}}} [image: {\displaystyle
g={\frac {GM}{r^{2}}}}]
That is the formula that enables us to calculate a body's surface gravity.M
= the body's mass; r = the object's radius g = surface gravityG = 6.0
x 10^-11 (the gravitational constant)
The moon's mass is 1/81 that of Earth.
If one performs the calculation, one will notice that the moon's gravity is
1/6th that of Earth, even if the moon's mass is much less.(The moon is much
smaller than Earth, so a person standing on the moon's surface, such as,
well, each of the twelve astronauts who actually walked on it, is closer to
all the particles comprising the moon. If the moon were the size of Earth
and its mass was 1/81 that of the Earth, the surface gravity would be far,
far weaker.
A side note related to this issue: during one of our shows, the narrator
mentioned that the Apollo astronauts only weighed about 80 pounds on the
moon. A patron came up to me after the show and asked, "Well, if the moon
has one sixth the Earth's gravity, wouldn't the astronauts have weighed 500
pounds on Earth? They all looked like they were in good shape." The
astronauts were all in good shape. However, when wearing all their
equipment, the astronauts did weigh about 500 pounds.
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