What happened to the rover the astronauts were driving on the moon?

Question

They did not bring it back with them. Also, why can't we see the rover and the U.S. flag with a telescope. If they, NASA, wanted to shut the mouths of skeptics, why don't they simply send an unmanned craft, somewhat like a rover they sent to Mars, and take pictures of the flag and rover if they are truly there?

Answer 1

The skeptics want to believe that the moon landing was faked. They're not interested in hearing evidence to the contrary. If you showed it to one, they'd insist it was a fake anyway.

Besides, they did leave evidence on the moon. They installed laser reflectors that allow Earth-based astronomers (even amateurs) to bounce lasers off the moon to precisely determine the distance from Earth. If nobody landed on the moon, who installed the reflectors that the scientific community uses on a regular basis?

Answer 2

The "moon buggies" are still up there. Some have speculated that if the batteries were replace, that they would still be usable.

There are no telescopes, on the ground or in space, that are capable of resolving objects that small on the surface of the moon. At a distance of 240,000 miles, not even the LM landing stages are large enough to be more than one pixel wide.

The first link below is a photo, taken by Hubble, of the Apollo 17 landing site. Even large craters are blurry. The second link below is an explanation of why that is.

1) Twelve 12 American astronauts have walked on the moon.

Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 12: Pete Conrad & Alan Bean
Apollo 13: << failed to land on the moon >>
Apollo 14: Alan Shepard & Edgar (Ed) Mitchell
Apollo 15: David Scott & James Irwin
Apollo 16: John Young & Charles Duke
Apollo 17: Eugene (Gene) Cernan & Harrison Schmidt


2) Why haven't we been back?

a) American astronauts visited the moon on six occasions.

b) The "moon race" was an extension of the cold war. It was mostly about national prestige. We got there first and achieved our primary objective. There was some good science: surveys, measurements, sample collection. But it was mostly about being there first. Once we achieved our primary objective, there was no political will to go back. There still isn't. Perhaps, if we discover He3 or something else valuable, there will be.

c) I used to travel to Crested Butte, Colorado every year to ski. Because I don't go anymore, does it mean that I never went?


3) What about the Van Allen radiation belts? Wouldn't it have killed the astronauts?

The existence of the Van Allen radiation belts postulated in the 1940s by Nicholas Christofilos. Their existence was confirmed in *1958* by the Explorer I satellite launched by the USA.

The radiation in the Van Allen radiation belts is not particularly strong. You would have to hang out there for a week or so in order to get radiation sickness. And, because the radiation is not particularly strong, a few millimeters of metal is all that is required for protection. "An object satellite shielded by 3 mm of aluminum will receive about 2500 rem (25 Sv) per *year*."

"In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [6]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation." When the astronauts returned to Earth, their dosimeters showed that they had received about as much radiation as a couple of medical X-rays.


4) The U.S. government scammed everyone?

In 1972, there was a politically motivated burglary of a hotel room in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. There were only about six or eight people who knew about it. However, those people, including Richard M. Nixon, the President of the United States, failed to keep that burglary a secret. It exploded into a scandal that drove the President and a number of others from office.

If six or eight people couldn't keep a hotel room burglary a secret, then how could literally thousands of people could have kept their mouths shut about six faked moon landings? Not just one moon landing, but six of them!


5) What about the USSR?

Even if NASA and other government agencies could have faked the six moon landings well enough to fool the general public, they could NOT have fooled the space agency or military intelligence types in the USSR. The Soviets were just dying to beat us. If the landings were faked, the Soviets would have re-engineered their N-1 booster and landed on the moon just to prove what liars Americans are. Why didn't they? Because the landings were real and the Soviets knew it.


6) Why does the flag shake? Where are the stars? Who took the video of Neil Armstrong?

On the subject of stars, take a look at the third link. Sorry, but there *are* stars in that photo. For the rest, visit "badastronomy" and "clavius". They deal well with all of the technical questions.


7) Finally, please tell us what you would accept as definitive evidence that the six moon landings were real. Is there anything?

Answer 3

Anyone that believes we had men actually stand on the moons surface in 1969 believe in miracles of the highest order possible! None of the computers available at that time could possibly handle the assignment. They went into orbit and returned two weeks later after never going near the moon! The entire operation was a massive fake! They bounce laser beams off the moons nominal surface all the time, as well as radar beams it doesn't mean there is any devices there to receive either of the above forms of radiation! If they have telescopes and camera images of galaxies trillions of light years removed from us then surely they can see clearly any site on the moons surface. I am so tired of reading that no telescopes exist with that capability! Do you have any idea how incredibly stupid you sound when you make such statements?

Answer 4

No existing telescope, including the Hubble Space Telescope, has enough resolving power to show any objects left behind on the moon. About the best the HST can do is resolve objects down to 280 feet across. See a HST photo of the lunar surface at this website ==>http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/moon/hst_moon_9914b.jpg

Even if NASA did waste the time and money to send a vehicle to the moon to verify that we'd already put men down there, the numbskulls who are convinced the Apollo landings were all hoaxes would just scream that the verification photos and data themselves were faked too.

Answer 5

No, the best telescope (Hubble) has a digital camera on it. Each of those pixels is the size of a football field on the moon. So no, you can't distinguish anything that size.

But NASA has no reason to. Only a few conspiracy nuts think we didn't land on the moon, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise - they'll just claim the pictures were doctored or something. NASA has nothing to prove - it's proved itself many times over. People like that will never be convinced.

Answer 6

What would be the point? A very expensive expedition to satisfy a few skeptics, while the vast majority accepts the reality of the moon landings. And then the skeptics would insist that NASA had faked the picture-taking mission!

Answer 7

The moon buggies are still there and available to anyone who wants them.
The instantaneous field of view of a the best digital camera or infra red line scanner is well over 150 meters at that
distance and would never resolve such small objects.
NASA doesn't care care about the skeptics they would never be convinced.

Answer 8

I bought the rover and flag from OJ Simpson on eBay. He told me that they were left over from a movie he did and not the real ones. I don't believe him though, because Niel Armstrong's DNA was on the flag.

Answer 9

All the stuff is there. sending a rover to the moon would be a waste of $.

Answer 10

You don't think the skeptics, would say something like, "the probe didn't really go to the moon, it's in the same studio where they shot all the moon missions."

You can't convince a skeptic.