As if it were needed. Obviously the Hoax Believers will have some sort of hair brained response and some of you won't like the science by press release aspect of it, but here goes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6966655.stm

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Of all the things I've ever lost, I miss my mind the most!

Yup , just seen that , I've got to say 1.3GB is a LOT of data to fake for just one image ..

Its just one more example of just how impressive Project Apollo really was , and just how limited the HB'ers are !

That 5 millionths of a metre is scanning resolution, not smallest identifiable unit on the lunar surface, just to be clear. As long as the resolution of the negatives is rougher than 5 millionths, this scanning resolution simply means that no data is lost due to scanning.

I think that should be "scans".

The "few seconds" actually were quite a lot of seconds IIRC, though the event is often presented as if he had like 3 seconds left.

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Yep; We finally have the technology to fake the higher resolutions...
What science? Am I missing something? I see an article explaining that simply says that they are going to begin to scan old pictures. (that were Hidden on Funk & Wagnall's porch, hermetically sealed in a mayonaisse jar)

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Maybe it will be only a matter of time before someone starts comparing the older scans versus these high-resolution scans and spot all kinds of anomalies.

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Please don't give them ideas, Bert!

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Clearly that whole artical is a hoax! Every body knows that Prof Robinson was sent on a mission to Alpha Centari in 1998. Along with Will and Dr. Smith.
The BBC should get proof readers.

I wonder with five millionths of a meter resolution if they will now be able to identify any artifacts left on the moon such as the LMs and the lunar rovers.

I already explained it. It's the scanner resolution, it's the smallest discernable particle of the negative. Not the smallest discernable feature on the picture on the negative.

Whether the picture itself on the negative would be taken with a microscopic image with 3 nanometer resolution or with some starmap radar with 1 lightyear resolution, the scanning resolution remains 5 millionths of a meter and as long as this is sufficient to fully capture the negative grain, it changes nothing to the original picture resolution.

The only thing it means in practice is that you get the negatives in digital format with as little loss as possible. You will never see more details than the original camera taking the picture could see, so if that camera didn't have the resolution to resolve apollo artifacts, the best possible scan of its negatives will also not show these artifacts.

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We have plenty of highly detailed Apollo images that identify artifacts that were left on the moon. See here, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:A...ting_place.jpg

If you don't accept the evidence of images like that, why would you care about any other Apollo images?

Anyway, you aren't going to get anything like that from orbit, because they didn't have a huge telescope available to point at the site. As Nicolas pointed out, no matter what scanning resolution is used to capture the image data from the film, it can't capture more information than is there in the first place.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

but.. but..but..
on tv shows and in the movies, they can digitally zoom in and practically discern the individual molecules in a ketchup stain on the shirt of a bad guy using only grainy security camera footage shot from 100 feet away in a dark parking ramp at midnight.
they couldn't show it on tv if it wasn't true..

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The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I hate it when they do that. I even saw it in one of the more serious series such as Silent Witness.

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Well, I for one love the beauty of the pictures. I can never get tired of looking at that terrain. One thing is for certain. There is no faking 'em!

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To the point where we can easily fake individual grains of 1 ASA film...

What more do you need?

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Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

This is a MAJOR pet peeve of mine. It's almost as if the more an object is magnified, the clearer the image becomes...it drives me crazy.

While the maximum achievable resolution was exagerated, there is a movie (independence day?) where somewhere in the beginning they use a spy sat to zoom in on a beach and more particular a rather female person, and they do take into account that the more they zoom in, the blockier the image becomes. But other than that, I've hardly ever seen the "find solution by zooming in" thing realistically. The best I've seen was identifying license plates via spy sats with a good enough resolution if commanded to focus on the plate at the moment of exposure rather than a magical post processing zoom-in.

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Wasn't Independence Day...
If Independence Day had ANY kind of scientific accuracy I would be amazed.

I think you are thinking of a Harrison Ford movie- I'm not sure. But it was a terrorist camp in the desert right?

Bad boys? I doubt it was enemy of the state. Maybe the movie with the A-bomb in the train of which I keep forgetting the title .

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Clear and Present Danger? The "SpySat" in the movie was the "project" for a Space Systems Design course I took some years back.
Between the satellite size, complexity, power and maneuvering fuel requirements, and very low time on target, we determined they'd do much better with a high altitude drone...

I wonder if you'd like to read the article properly. They are not talking about taking new pictures of the lunar surface, but scanning the existing pictures from Apollo. The resolution is referring to the new scans of exisiting images. If the existing images didn't have the resolution to pick out the artifacts (which they didn't) the new scans won't show them because they won't be in the image in the first place.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.