Moon Landing’s True

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Listening speculation on doubt about moon landing, I dig more to both the Soviet Era and American sides’ sources, drawing irrefutable evidences that moon landing did really occured.

Faking such a landing would be harder than actually accomplishing it

Yury Kostitsyn, the head of Russia’s Institute of Analytical Chemistry said, referring to recent statements of Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin joking at the purpose of Russia’s own future lunar missions will be to prove or disprove the 1969 Apollo 11 landing, give the country an opportunity to check whether Neil Armstrong’s footprints are actually out there.

Thankfully, in science, we don’t need to be there ourselves to have proof. Here are four different pieces of evidence from the American side that demonstrates the Moon landings actually occurred.

1.) Lunar footprints. Here on Earth, footprints generally don’t last very long. Wherever you leave your tracks, you fully expect that whether it takes minutes, days, or weeks, eventually the natural phenomena in the world will cover them up. Winds blowing along the sand dunes, rains in the forest, or plant and animal activity will eventually eliminate the evidence of your passing. All of this happens for a variety of reasons, which include:

  • the fact that the Earth has an atmosphere,
  • that we have weather,
  • that we have liquid water at our surface,
  • and that we have living species on our world.

Without winds, rains, snows, glaciers, rockslides, or any other means of moving and rearranging the particles on the surface of the Moon, any footprints that we left there should remain for an interminable length of time.

2.) Over 8,000 photos documenting our trips. Perhaps we all need a reminder of what the sacrifices were that went into our journey to the Moon. We accomplished the unthinkable by banding together to achieve a common goal, and could do it all once again. NASA has released all the photos of the twelve Apollo missions that made it to space on a publicly available Flickr photostream, sorted into a series of incredible albums by moon missions.

3.) Scientific equipment we’ve installed on the Moon. Did you know that we brought up a large amount of scientific equipment and installed it on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions?

  • Lunar seismometers were installed by Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16, with the most advanced ones transmitting data to Earth until 1977.
  • Apollo 11 installed the lunar laser ranging retroreflector array, which is still operational today, allowing us to reflect lasers off of it and measure the Earth-Moon distance to ~centimeter precision. (We also use Apollo 14, 15, and the Soviet Lunokhud 2 rover for this.)
  • The SWC experiment, to measure the solar wind composition from the Moon’s surface.
  • The SWS experiment to measure the solar wind’s spectra from the Moon.
  • The LSM experiment to measure the lunar magnetic field.
  • The LDD to measure how lunar dust would settle on and pollute solar panels.

And many others. That we have the data from these experiments, and that the lunar retroreflectors are still in use today, represent some pretty strong evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon.

4.) We brought back samples, and learned a ton about lunar geology from them. The final two astronauts to ever walk on the Moon, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, ran into quite a surprise when they did. Schmitt, the lone civilian-astronaut (and only scientist) to travel to the Moon..

There are many different lines of evidence that point to humanity’s presence on the Moon. We landed there and can see the evidence, directly, when we look with the appropriate resolution. We have extraordinary amounts of evidence, ranging from eyewitness testimony to the data record tracking the missions to photographs documenting the trips, all supporting the fact that we landed and walked on the lunar surface. We have a slew of scientific instruments that were installed, took data, and a few of which can still be seen and used today. And finally, we’ve brought back lunar samples and learned about the Moon’s history, composition, and likely origin from it.

There are many ways to prove it, but the conclusion is inescapable: we really did land on the Moon, and we can validate it yet again by performing the right scientific test through imaging or laser ranging any time needed.