Green trail, golden leaf! (part 2)

Hi,
in the last post I was writing about the contest I was one, so check it out if you have not already.

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It was pretty cool, and I got surprised at how the kids discussed with me so many things on my presentation.

Those were the questions I mentioned last post:

 

1. Name 3 astronauts
2. What is astronomical unit and what is light year
3. Name 3 missions (Apollo and other count as 1)
4. Name 4 constellations that are visible in Czech Republic
5. Highest mountain in Solar System and where it is
6. Where do comets come from?
7. Difference between meteorite, meteor, meteoroid and asteroid.
8. … (and other)

These were for younger kids and there were two more though I can not remember them..

The first question was normally quite ok, though not always they got 3. Of course most said Armstrong and Gagarin and some people said Vladimír Remek who is the first Czech astronaut.

Astronomical unit is distance from Earth to Sun and light year is the distance the light travels in one year. I thought that those would be very easy but actually to my surprise the kids usually knew what light year is but not AU, though I would guess rather the opposite.

Three missions? Most said Apollo and Sputnik (really, why Sputnik?). Some said the third which was for example Curiosity.

Four constellations are Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Leo, Orion… and so on, we did not approve parts of constellation like Big Dipper which is just part of Ursa Major.

Olympus Moons on Mars.. few kids new this.

Nobody knew both Kuiper belt and Oort cloud I think and some teams knew one, this was kind of hard I guess.

You already know the difference from one of my posts!

Questions for older kids:

 

1. What is afelium and perihelium
2. Name all Galilean moons and give a small info for one of them
3. What is HR diagram
4. (Lot of pictures about life time of star)
5. Draw the orbit of typicall comet and draw both tails and name one place where they come from.
6. What is the heaviest element that fuses in core of star.
7. …

Afelium: furthest point to Sun. Perihelium: closest point to Sun.
Most people did not know.

Only one group was able to name Europa, Callisto, Ganymede and Io.. most did not know what Galilean moons are.

I already described HR diagram in one post, I really love it though!

There was nebulae, protostar (most people did not recognize it), normal star, red giant, supernova, white dwarf, neutron star and black hole.

Comet has very elliptical orbit and it comes either from Kuiper belt or Oort cloud as I said.
It has two types of tails:

There are two types of tails.

It is iron!

Dragallur

 

 

 

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Apollo missions: Apollo 11

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes! Finally after so many posts I am here with the most famous space flight EVER! The Apollo 11, I know it was a bit strange that I was writing about conspiracy of moon landing before talking about moon landing. Here it comes now, this surely long waited post!

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First of all: the crew.
Neil Armostrong was the captain of this mission. As probably all astronauts, before his space carrier he was working as pilot in the US Navy even fighting in Korean war.
After that he joined the NASA program and he flied for the first time in Gemini 8 mission which was the first mission to connect two separate parts of rocket in space.
After that his second and last flight was in the year of 1969 which was Apollo 11. He died because of some heart complications in the year 2012.

The name of the second guy is Buzz Aldrin. Again he was working for military and fighting in Korean war. His first mission was Gemini 12 and then of course A11. He is now 85 years old and he is the second person to step on Moon!

Poor Michael Collins even that he was in the Apollo 11 mission he was not allowed to step on Moon because he was orbiting our satellite while the other guys were having fun down there. Again he was pilot in military and he was also in Gemini 10 mission.

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Now for the mission itself.

The mission started 16th July of 1969. The crew rode in Saturn V rocket. It took them 12 minutes to get on the orbit and they made 1.5 turn around Earth. After this they made right for Moon. There were 4 corrections of direction assumed but they had to do only one somewhere in the middle of the way. It took three days to get on the orbit of Moon.

The picture on the right was taken from Columbia (the thing that stayed on the orbit all the time of landing) and it shows Eagle (the thing that landed on Moon).

When the landing module was going down in few phases there were some problems with computer and with their position because the motors were on for a longer time that they needed to be.

Computer was not able to count their landing position because of “executive overflow” which was caused by it to use its computing power on meeting radar which was not used at that point. One young guy named Steve Bales called in this very pressing moment that they can continue which was then awarded with medal of freedom.

 It was planned that they would sleep for five hours but Armostrong and Buzz decided not to, since they would not be able to fall asleep. It took them 3.5 hours to prepare and then they opened the door and in 2:56UTC 21.7.1969 he said the famous sentence about stepping on ground (and he also stepped there)!
They took the first samples of Moon rock, then they put there American flag, seismometer and something with laser which I am not really sure what it was. Also what is less known when they were leaving Moon they left there message:

Here men from planet Earth First set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

Then they left some stuff on the surface so they had lower mass and flied back to Earth. They were safely recovered from ocean.

This mission accomplished the thing that Kennedy wanted Americans to achieve: In 60s they landed on Moon.
Also this was very good for USA because they practically won the space race.

In 70s lot of people raised and said that it was fake. I have already lot of posts about it so check it out!
Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 6) No blast crater

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes. Today I will write about another part of conspiracy theory of Moon landing. I know it seems that the list of hoaxes is not ending. And yes it is very long and that is why this hoax is so popular, it seems that there is so many arguments that even if one or two are wrong there is another squad standing behind, it is TRUE. But it will be debunked, I promise!

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Today I will talk about the “No blast crater” argument. To this one next picture relates and it is showing lander with circle on the place where should be blast crater.
When all Apollo landings landed it is assumed that they should left a huge blast crater behind since they would fell in great speeds. Also by the way the lander would not survive if it crashed with such a speed to create crater.
Here comes the question: How did NASA managed to not create blast crater?

They DID NOT go so fast when they were landing! As Phil Plait said:

When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour?

Not only that they landed in small speeds but also the surface there is right under millimeters of dust hard rock and the gravity of Moon is much smaller (1/6).
The thing is that actually the lander had so big area of its “legs” that there was about 1,5 pound per square inch which is less than when the astronauts were walking on the Moon and that is why they were making footprints.

Some would say that footprints need water to form, but look at flour, it does not need it! It just stays in very steep shapes! This is called angle of repose. Things that have higher friction are able to have higher angle of repose. Also this is changed by gravity.

Dragallur

PS: I am going to make videos on YouTube. Today or in the weekend I will release probably first one so check it out (channel is ScienceAndRationality)!
1st picture: http://www.americanmoon.org/top10/index.htm
2nd picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose

WTF? A conspiracy? 5) Not parallel shadows

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes! Another debunking of the Moon hoax. As for now I already covered 4 “arguments” and you can check them on my other posts, just to see how silly they are.
Flag flapping in the breeze. Deadly radiation of Van Allen belts. Copied backgrounds of NASA images and Erased stars on the pictures + the prologue of those series.

So today I continue and this time I chose the argument of non-parallel shadows on the pictures by NASA.

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As you can see on the picture which was taken on Moon the shadows seem very strange. The yellow lines clearly show that the light is much closer to the objects and the Sun would not cast such shadows. This clearly means that those photos are faked and we never went to the Moon.

Ok here comes the fun part again. The hoaxers forgot on thing named: perspective.
The thing is that the Moon is 3D while the photo is just two dimensional. This makes some strange things such as those shadows. Actually I found one debunker to have on his page this photo so, thanks to him. If you viewed this from birds view you would clearly see that those shadows are parallel but from ground and on picture it seems as the shadows head into different directions, so if you dont believe that the Earth is hoaxed you should be convinced. If not you can try it for yourself. Plus if there is some downhill it can be distorted even more.

Thats about it. Thanks for reading.
Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 4) Identical backgrounds

Hi,
with one day pause I am coming with post about conspiracy theory of Moon landing. Yes again there is another “argument” by those hoaxers which I am going to crush to pieces thanks to awesome Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy webpage.
This time lets focus on identical backgrounds on two images which were surely taken from very different distances and they must be faked because NASA was too lazy and they used same background twice.

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Ok so here are the pictures from Apollo 15. On the first one where you can see more of those mountains there is no moonlanding apparatus and there is this rocky ground. While on the other there is the opposite but on both pictures there are same “backgrounds” used.
Fine here comes the debunktion. On Moon things stuff does not behave as one would execpt. On Earth we can judge distances by things around because we already know their size from experience, like house, shrub or car. But we dont have these things on Moon.
Once I was looking into the heart of Black Canyon in USA. It was one of the best things I have seen in my entire life and the same thing happened, I was not able to judge the distance.. it looked like that the bottom is 200 meters below me, but bottom of Black Canyon can be almost 700 meters (on the picture you can see the tallest cliff in Colorado, it was taken from wikipedia, thanks).

So there are no things by which you could judge the size of stuff which means that you dont really know how far it is + we also judge by the blur of the air. When there is stuff far away it is much less visible but on the Moon there is everything perfectly clear and you dont know if the rock is meter, 2, 200 or 10000 far away. Here is nice video which will blow your mind and show that you simply can not trust your eyes.

This means that the first picture is probably much closer to the mountains but still very very far away since they are on both pictures of identical size.

Dragallur
Check out the debunking of: Flag, Stars. And the prologue.

 

WTF? A conspiracy? 1) Flag flapping

Hi,
last time I talked about a conspiracy about landing on the Moon. Ok I say it is crap and I will try to destroy all the arguments against Apollo 11.
Today I will start with hoax number 1.

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Flag flapping in the breeze!

As you can see on this picture there is Neil Armstrong standing next to flag which is said to be flapping in the air, while there is no air on the surface because there is no atmosphere which means no wind.. this is right there can not be any breeze, BUT those people forgot about something.

Ok, so what else could make this flag moving? Right it is the astronaut himself. When Neil or Aldrin took this flag and they put it to the ground they were definitely moving with it and since there is not air friction flag kept on flapping for long time so it looked like breeze. I found video by mythbusters where they show this, plus they test it of course with Earth´s gravity while on Moon I assume that it would be flapping even longer since the gravity would not pull it so much.

Plus if there would be breeze there would be also dust flying around, it is not.

Amy Shira Teitel explains how the flags were constructed so make sure to check it.

There are many arguments so I will explain them one by one in future episodes.

Dragallur

EDIT: The first picture on which it seems that the flag is moving, actually it does not move. The horizontal pole of the flag was not fully expanded and Neil with Aldrin wanted it to look like it is flapping, actually no it is still they did their job really well :D.

Apollo missions: Apollo 10

Hi,
what a surprise! I am here again with Apollo missions this time with fourth manned mission.

Apollo 10 was launched in the year 1969 May 18 and 16:49:00 PM. Members of crew were three of course: from left to right Cernan, Stafford and Young.

Stafford was captain. Apollo 10 crew were unique because it was first Apollo mission where all members were already in space (Apollo 11 was second and last). Both Young and Stafford were flying for the third time while Cernan for second.

There was also back up crew if some problems occurred but Cooper and Eisele (Apollo 7) were not in favor of NASA because of some incidents on their missions so it was not planned to move them on next mission (as was usual) and they were back up crew only because NASA did not have enough experienced astronauts.

Highlight of this mission were prepared so that they had all data they needed for Apollo 11 which would two months later land on Moon. Everything they needed to do was done, the most important thing was to approach Moon as close as possible.
By one historian it is said that NASA had to give them low amount of fuel so they could not land Moon even if they wanted.

This approaching was achieved by departing a little Lunar module (called Snoopy, it is on the picture with moon) leaving only Young on the board of “Mothership” while Stafford and Cernan achieved the distance from surface of 15.6 km.

Apollo 10 orbited Moon thirty times and then after 8 days and 3 minutes and 23 seconds they splashed down in the Pacific ocean (actually mission was planned 1 minute shorter this means that they really messed it up).

One of Snoopy´s stage was left there and nobody knows where it landed (crushed) but in the year of 2011 group of amateurs started project to find it out.

Dragallur

I was taking data from these pages:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo10.html#.Vi5Wz7erTc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10

Read about Apollo 9!