NPR: If NASA Faked Moon Landings, It Did a Heck of a Job

If NASA Faked Moon Landings, It Did a Heck of a Job

An image of the moon from the Apollo 15 mission.

Courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center and Arizona State University

Check out these fascinating, detailed photos of the surface of the moon (or is it a soundstage in Area 51 of the Nevada desert? I always get confused.)

For almost 40 years, the complete photographic record of the Apollo moon missions has been locked in a freezer. But now, Arizona State University is teaming up with NASA to scan the 36,000 photos and make them freely available on the Web. The project will take three years, as each negative has to be carefully warmed back to room temperature, cleaned and scanned down to the very grain of the film. The digital files are so large (some up to 11.8 gigabytes!) that the photos are copied to a hard drive and shipped via UPS, rather than bogging down the university's Internet system.

So, other than the coolness factor, why bother? Scientists say that they can use the digital photos to find changes in the surface of the moon over the last 40 years. Plus, it will keep the conspiracy theorists busy for the next 40 years looking for suspicious flaws. (Somebody over at the blog Slashdot already found a stray hair on a photo. Hmmmmm.)

Now, if we could just get the government to release detailed scans of the Zapruder film.

- Robert Smith

11:45 AM ET | 08- 6-2007 | permalink

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