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This is a video showing all 135 launches of the various Space Shuttle at once.
Turn up your sound. I’ve seen this done with episodes of the Simpsons and Star Trek, but this is way better. The fade out on the tiny Challenger square is surprisingly affecting. Created by McLean Fahnestock.
When they were launched in 1977, the two Voyager spacecraft each carried with them a 12-inch gold-plated copper record containing multimedia pertaining to life on Earth, the idea being that if an extraterrestrial ran across one of these records millions of years from now, they could play it an learn something about our planet. This site has a listing of some of the music, images, and sounds contained on the records. Here are two of the images included…the first is a rudimentary mathematics primer and the second is a family portrait:
I wonder when we’ll see these records again. I mean, it seems more plausible that Elon Musk’s grandson will mount an expedition to retrieve a Voyager probe in 2077 than some alien running across the thing.
Venus passed in front of the Sun yesterday for the last time until 2117. The transit took almost seven hours but this NASA video shows it in under a minute.
I missed this last July when the news came out, but since I’ve been following the Pioneer Anomaly for the past eight years, I wanted to mention it here for closure purposes. First, what the hell is the Pioneer Anomaly?
The Pioneer anomaly or Pioneer effect is the observed deviation from predicted accelerations of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft after they passed about 20 astronomical units (3×10^9 km; 2×10^9 mi) on their trajectories out of the Solar System. Both Pioneer spacecraft are escaping the Solar System, but are slowing under the influence of the Sun’s gravity. Upon very close examination of navigational data, the spacecraft were found to be slowing slightly more than expected. The effect is an extremely small but unexplained acceleration towards the Sun, of 8.74±1.33x10^-10 m/s^2.
A team at JPL has tracked the problem to uneven heat emissions from the probes’ fuel source.
For their new analysis, Turyshev et. al. compiled a lot more data than had ever been analyzed before, spanning a much longer period of the Pioneers’ flight times. They studied 23 years of data from Pioneer 10 instead of just 11, and 11 years of data from Pioneer 11 instead of 3. As explained in their new paper, the more complete data sets reveal that the spacecraft’s anomalous acceleration did indeed seem to decrease with time. In short, the undying force had been dying after all, just like the decaying plutonium.
A more recent paper by the same researchers offers even more support for their theory. Case closed, I say.
An extensive collection gathered from all over the internet of the source code and documentation for NASA’s Apollo and Gemini programs. Here’s part of the source code for Apollo 11’s guidance computer.
And here’s an interesting tidbit about the core rope memory used for the Apollo’s guidance computer:
Fun fact: the actual programs in the spacecraft were stored in core rope memory, an ancient memory technology made by (literally) weaving a fabric/rope, where the bits were physical rings of ferrite material.
“Core” memory is resistant to cosmic rays. The state of a core bit will not change when bombarded by radiation in Outer Space. Can’t say the same of solid state memory.
Woven memory! Also called LOL memory:
Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories. Some programmers nicknamed the finished product LOL memory, for Little Old Lady memory.
You’ve likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it’s in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
Watch, and more importantly, listen to the whole thing…at the very end, you can see the second booster land a few hundred yards away from the first one. Who knew that being in space sounds like being trapped with a whale underwater in a tin pail? (via ★mouser)
On a recent pass, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught this dust devil dancing its way across the surface of Mars.
The active dust devil displays a delicate arc produced by a westerly breeze partway up its height. The dust plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.
The image was taken during the time of Martian year when that planet is farthest from the sun. Just as on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun’s rays declines during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.
Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust they pull off the ground. Unlike a tornado, a dust devil typically forms on a clear day when the ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground. As heated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above it, the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.
Scott Carpenter was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the Earth. Just before he went into space, his father wrote this wonderful letter.
And I venture to predict that after all the huzzas have been uttered and the public acclaim is but a memory, you will derive the greatest satisfaction from the serene knowledge that you have discovered new truths. You can say to yourself: this I saw, this I experienced, this I know to be the truth. This experience is a precious thing; it is known to all researchers, in whatever field of endeavour, who have ventured into the unknown and have discovered new truths.
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
(via stellar)
The Cassini spacecraft caught this remarkable photo of Saturn eclipsing the Sun in 2006.
Click through for the big image and the massive image. If you look close can see the Earth in the image, for reals!
From late last week, news that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found possible evidence that there’s flowing water on Mars.
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.
“The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.
There are only a few images, but even this brief look at a mid-70s NASA graphic standards manual is tantalizing.
(via stellar)
From earlier this month at In Focus, a photographic look at the “dizzying inspiration and crushing disappointment” of NASA’s Space Shuttle program. (via @robinsloan)
From a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology entitled Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development, and Sex In Outer Space:
Humans are sexual beings and it can be predicted that male and female astronauts will engage in sexual relations during a mission to Mars, leading to conflicts and pregnancies and the first baby born on the Red Planet. Non-human primate and astronaut sexual behavior is reviewed including romantic conflicts involving astronauts who flew aboard the Space Shuttle and in simulated missions to Mars, and men and women team members in the Antarctic. The possibilities of pregnancy and the effects of gravity and radiation on the testes, ovaries, menstruation, and developing fetus, including a child born on Mars, are discussed. What may lead to and how to prevent sexual conflicts, sexual violence, sexual competition, and pregnancy are detailed. Recommendations include the possibility that male and female astronauts on a mission to Mars, should fly in separate space craft.
Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.
(thx, anil)
NASA’s astrobiology announcement is that they’ve found a new kind of life that incorporates the normally toxic arsenic into its DNA.
Life like us uses a handful of basic elements in the majority of its biochemistry: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen for the most part. But phosphorus is also a critical element in two major ways: it’s used as the backbone of the long, spiral-shaped DNA and RNA molecules (think of it as the winding support structure for a spiral staircase and you’ll get the picture), and it’s part of the energy transport mechanism for cells in the form of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). Without it, our cells would literally not be able to reproduce, and we’d be dead anyway if it were gone. There are many other ways phosphorus is used as well, including in cell membranes, bones, and so on. It’s a key element for all forms of life.
[…]
Amazingly, using radioisotope-tagged molecules containing arsenic, they were able to find that the microbes incorporated the arsenic into their very DNA! It’s hard to stress how shocking this is; as I understand it, saying something like that to a microbiologist without evidence would’ve had them slowly backing away from you and looking for weapons or an escape route.
I guessed wrong about what NASA was set to announce today, but the actual announcement is much more interesting than the mere discovery of extraterrestrial life. Aliens are inevitable — we’re going to find them sooner or later — but a new kind of DNA, that’s not something that happens every day. Exciting! (thx, jon)
Spacelog is taking the original NASA transcripts from early space missions and snazzing them up with a more compelling presentation. Here’s the famous moment in the Apollo 13 mission:
Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
Wonderful stuff. The site is looking for help with getting more missions transcripts up…go here and scroll down to “Getting involved without technical knowledge”. Although I think they’d get more people involved if they didn’t just dump people into GitHub. (thx, the 50 people who sent this to me this morning)
Here’s a curious press release from NASA:
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
I did a little research on the news conference participants and found:
1. Pamela Conrad (a geobiologist) was the primary author of a 2009 paper on geology and life on Mars
2. Felisa Wolfe-Simon (an oceanographer) has written extensively on photosynthesis using arsenic recently (she worked on the team mentioned in this article)
3. Steven Benner (a biologist) is on the “Titan Team” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they’re looking at Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) as an early-Earth-like chemical environment. This is likely related to the Cassini mission.
4. James Elser (an ecologist) is involved with a NASA-funded astrobiology program called Follow the Elements, which emphasizes looking at the chemistry of environments where life evolves (and not just looking at water or carbon or oxygen).
So, if I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on Thursday, I’d say that they’ve discovered arsenic on Titan and maybe even detected chemical evidence of bacteria utilizing it for photosynthesis (by following the elements). Or something like that. (thx, sippey)
Update: According to Alexis Madrigal, the answer to the hyperbolic question in the headline is “no”.
I’m sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I’ve seen the Science paper. It’s not that.
For one thing, sleeping is more troublesome than you’d think, considering the remote location:
The onslaught of apparent days and nights would play havoc with astronauts’ body clocks, so a shutters-down and bedtime schedule is imposed by mission controllers. Each of the crew has a closet-like cabin where they can hook a sleeping bag to the wall and settle down for the night. Some strap pillows to their heads to make it feel more like lying down. The lights don’t go out completely, though. People dozing in orbit see streaks and bursts of bright colour caused by high-energy cosmic rays painlessly slamming into their retinas. Fans and air filters add to the distractions, so some astronauts wear ear plugs to block out the constant hum.
Unsurprisingly, falling asleep can take some getting used to. Just as you are nodding off, you can feel as though you’ve fallen off a 10-storey building. People who look half asleep will suddenly throw their heads back with a start and fling out their arms. It gets easier with time. One Russian crew member is renowned for doing without a sleeping bag and falling asleep wherever he ends the day. Anyone still awake after bedtime would see his snoozing form drift by, slowly bouncing off the walls, his course set by the air currents that gently pushed and pulled him.
Whoa! The whole thing is worth a read.
Remember the boiling tongue water story from yesterday’s post about how long a human can last in the vacuum of space? Here’s the video of that depressurization event, with the participants taking about it:
(thx, brad)
From NASA, an extensive listing of the “wake-up” music heard by astronauts on their missions in space. For Apollo 17’s first wake-up call on the Moon, they played Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries while the second Space Shuttle mission crew got stuck with “Pigs in Space comedy routine #1 by The Muppets”. (via girlhacker)
The answer, straight from NASA.
At NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in ‘65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.
Boiling tongue water! (via acts of volition)
The view is from one of the cameras close to the engines. The narration is great; you really get a sense of how many things had to be considered to make it to the Moon (like the launch pad paint that burned and charred in order to protect the underlying materials). (via df)
For a number of their recent missions, NASA has designed movie-like posters. This one was pretty clearly influenced by Star Trek:
Born in the 1950s, raised on comic book dreams of exploring deep space in a rocket ship, NASA showed a lot of promise as youngster. As NASA grew up, everyone told it to be realistic, focus on practical things closer to home: Velcro, Tang, pens that work upside down. Sure, it was taking care of its responsibilities, but its dreams faded away. Where did the last three decades go?
That’s from Modcult.
Update: See also Ron Planet. (thx, craig)
Speaking of the Moon, the LRO snapped a new picture of Apollo 11 landing site from its orbital perch 50km above the surface.
NASA announced that it has found pretty hard evidence of significant amounts of water on the Moon.
“We are ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.”
I don’t have to tell you about the implications here. Just think of how much you could sell authentic Moon bottled water for.
I said yesterday that NASA would be taking some new photos of the Apollo landing sites with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Turns out that happened pretty quickly…they just released photos of the Apollo 11, 14, 15, 16, and 17 sites. Here’s the Apollo 11 site:
The lunar module is the small white bit in the middle casting the long shadow. The Apollo 14 site is the coolest…you can see the path the astronauts took out to some scientific instruments. The LRO hasn’t reached its final orbit yet so future images “will have two to three times greater resolution”. !!! See also my giant Apollo 11 post.
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 and Monday is the same for both the first Moon landing and the first walk on the surface. In this entry, I’ve collected some of the best resources on the web related to the anniversary…articles, historical documents, audio, video, transcripts, photos, and the like. Enjoy.
We Choose the Moon is tracking the activities of the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago. Very nicely done.
Housed on NASA’s history site is a ton of resources about the Apollo 11 landing, including an annotated transript of the landing, which makes for really interesting reading. MP3 files are also available as are many, many video clips of the landing at the astronauts’ time on the surface. Highlights: this video was shot out of the window of the lunar module from a height of 50,000 feet until one minute after touchdown and I’ve never seen Armstrong’s first step on the Moon from this angle before.
For its July 21, 1969 issue, The NY Times used 96 pt. type to declare that MEN WALK ON MOON.
The landing was made four miles west of the aiming point, but well within the designated area. An apparent error in some data fed into the craft’s guidance computer from the earth was said to have accounted for the discrepancy.
Suddenly the astronauts were startled to see that the computer was guiding them toward a possibly disastrous touchdown in a boulder-filled crater about the size of a football field.
Mr. Armstrong grabbed manual control of the vehicle and guided it safely over the crater to a smoother spot, the rocket engine stirring a cloud of moon dust during the final seconds of descent.
The Onion used larger type and took a more unadulterated and profane approach (love the video version).
John Noble Wilford, the Times journalist who wrote the front page story underneath the 96 pt. type — “the biggest single story of my career” — recounts his Apollo 11 experience and ponders the Apollo program’s legacy in a great piece for the Times.
It then occurs to me that if Columbus and Capt. James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happens. Exploring is old, but instantaneous telecommunications is new and marvelous.
In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for radio waves to travel the 238,000 miles from Moon to Earth, each step by Armstrong and Aldrin is seen, and their voices heard, throughout the world they have for the time being left behind. In contrast to exploration’s previous landfalls, the whole world shares in this moment.
The Apollo 11 mission in photographs: NASA Images is the comprehensive source for NASA photos of the Apollo 11 mission; the always excellent Big Picture has photos of the mission from a variety of sources; David Burnett shot photos of people watching the launch; Time looks at Apollo astronauts Now and Then; the NY Times collected photos from readers of their Apollo 11 moments; Life has several photo galleries: Buzz Aldrin Looks Back, Scenes From the Moon, Up Close With Apollo 11 (rare and never-published photos), and The World Watches; and Google’s archive of Life magazine’s Apollo 11 images.
A map of where Armstrong and Aldrin walked during their 2+ hours on the surface. That same map superimposed on a soccer pitch and on a baseball field. They didn’t walk that far at all.
Explore the Apollo 11 landing site on Google Moon.
In piece published on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, Buzz Aldrin advocates not a return to the Moon but a mission to Mars with the objective of establishing a colony on the red planet.
Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America’s future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.
Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet’s surface.
Video of John F. Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the Moon” speech given at Rice University on September 12, 1962. Fewer than 7 years later, Apollo 11 achieved the goal that Kennedy laid out in that speech.
In a piece for New Scientist, Linda Geddes writes about possible future lunar parks and how they might be preserved.
Around these [landing sites] are scattered smaller artefacts and personal items, such as Neil Armstrong’s boots and portable life-support system, scientific instruments and their power generators — and, of course, the iconic US flag which remains planted in the moon’s surface. Then there are the footprints and rover tread paths. Despite the passing of the years, these remain carved into the dust because the moon has no wind or rain to wash them away.
Anthropologist P. J. Capelotti of Penn State University in Abington has mapped out five “lunar parks”. These cover the areas where the majority of the artefacts are concentrated and could be used as a basis for future preservation efforts. “Nobody’s saying that the whole moon has to be off limits, but as people are starting to make plans for tourism and mineral extraction, or for putting a base there, they just need to be aware of them and work around them.”
Since returning from the Moon, Neil Armstrong has been less and less willing to speak in public about his Apollo 11 experience. For the 40th anniversary, Armstrong will not take part in the NASA event to commemorate the landing. His only appearance related to the anniversary will be a 15-minute lecture at a Smithsonian Institution event on Sunday night. I found this event on the National Air and Space Museum site…maybe that’s it? If so, then Armstrong’s lecture will be webcast live on the NASA TV site that evening.
Popular Science shares a list of ten things you didn’t know about the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle’s door because there was no outer handle.
Moonwalk One is a documentary film about Apollo released in 1970 to little fanfare, even though it won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was commissioned by NASA but with so much Apollo activity and information happening in the late 60s and early 70s, no one was interested in distributing or seeing the film and it was soon forgotten. Recently, the only remaining 35mm print of the film was located under the director’s desk, restored, and offered for sale on DVD in time for the 40th anniversary.
To get a feel of what it was like in the Soviet Union during the Apollo 11 mission, Scientific American interviewed Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. The reaction was somewhat more subdued than in other parts of the world.
Of course, you cannot have people land on the moon and just say nothing. It was published in all the newspapers. But if you remember [back then] when Americans spoke of the first man in space, they were always talking of “the first American in space” [not Yuri Gagarin]. The same feeling was prevalent in Russia. There were small articles when Apollo 11 was launched. Actually, there was a small article on the first page of Pravda and then three columns on page five. I looked it up again.
Eat Me Daily explores the food consumed on the mission.
The Apollo crew even dined on thermo-stabilized cheddar cheese spread and hot dogs during the moon mission, bringing at least a bit of America in July to the sterile flight craft. And yes, there was bacon - foreshadowing the current bacon craze, the first meal eaten by man on the moon was none other than bacon cubes, coated with gelatin to combat crumbs.
The issue of the New Yorker published just after the Moon landing is worth a look: much of the Talk of the Town section is devoted to the landing and there’s also a Letter from the Space Center. (Subscribers only.)
The main NASA site has an interactive feature to explore the landing site and Eagle (Eagle was the name of the lunar module).
Finally, there’s still some good stuff to be had on the old telly on Monday. The History Channel has As It Happened: Man on the Moon at 8pm ET:
This special takes viewers back to July 1969 to experience the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man’s first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11’s mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.
and Moonshot, a two-hour documentary about Apollo 11, at 9pm ET. Turner Classic Movies is airing a bunch of Moon-related movies all day, including A Trip to the Moon (a 12-minute film from 1902) at 8pm ET and the excellent For All Mankind (newly out on Criterion Blu-ray) at 8:15pm ET. The Discovery Channel has When We Left the Earth, a one-hour documentary on the mission, at 10pm ET. If none of that tickles your fancy, try episode 6 of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon (available for the insanely low price of $12 on Amazon) or In the Shadow of the Moon on DVD.
[If you enjoyed this post, you should post it to Twitter.]
Update: Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, writes that landing on the Moon killed NASA.
Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable … how far-seeing … but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?
July Moon is a forthcoming documentary about some lost NASA tapes. Surely not these NASA tapes?
The computer source code that ran Apollo 11’s Command Module and Lunar Module has been released.
A recently discovered photo clearly shows Neil Armstrong’s face on the Moon through his visor.
He was the first man to walk on the moon, taking that one giant leap for mankind — yet most of the famous shots are of his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as it was Armstrong who manned the stills camera.
New Scientist overlaid the Apollo lunar excursion maps on top of cities in Google Earth. Neil and Buzz didn’t even leave Trafalgar Square on their trip to the Moon.
Hmm, I was just wondering about this the other day: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is going to take photos of some of the Apollo landing sites, including where Apollo 11 landed.
Lunar archaeologists, interested in making the Apollo 11 site a National Historic Landmark, hope the planned photos will answer some of these longstanding questions: What is the condition of Tranquility Base after 40 years? Was the American flag blown over on the Eagle’s ascent and is it now a bleached skeleton? What are the relatively long term effects of the lunar environment on human artifacts?
This should quiet the people who still think it was all a hoax…although NASA could be faking these photos as well.
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