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Founded January 1970
Julian Date: 2458830.16
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THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Meanwhile in the Moon Hoax Drama

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

{\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 gravity
G = 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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