Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings
This evidence provides independent confirmation of NASA's account of the six Apollo program Moon missions flown between 1969 and 1972.
[1] In 2008, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) SELENE lunar probe obtained several photographs showing evidence of Moon landings.
[2] On the left are two photographs taken on the lunar surface by astronauts on August 2, 1971 during the third Apollo 15 moonwalk at station 9A near Hadley Rille.
[citation needed] As with SELENE, the Terrain Mapping Camera of India's Chandrayaan-1 probe did not have enough resolution to record Apollo hardware.
[3][4] In April 2021 the ISRO Chandrayaan-2 orbiter captured an image of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle descent stage.
The orbiter's image of Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 landing site, was released to the public in a presentation on September 3, 2021.
It claims to have spotted traces of the Apollo landings and the lunar Rover, though the relevant imagery has not been publicly identified.
[11] A group at Kettering Grammar School, using simple radio equipment, monitored Soviet and U.S. spacecraft and calculated their orbits.
[29] Apollo 13 was intended to land on the Moon, but an oxygen tank explosion resulted in the mission being aborted after trans-lunar injection.
EAS members received an urgent call from NASA Ames Research Station, which had ties with Chabot's educational program since the 60s, and they put the Observatory's historic 20-inch refractor to work.
[31] Paul Wilson and Richard T. Knadle, Jr. received voice transmissions from the Command/Service Module in lunar orbit on the morning of August 1, 1971.
[42][43][44][45] Quoting from James Hansen's 2005 biography of Neil Armstrong, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong: For those few misguided souls who still cling to the belief that the Moon landings never happened, examination of the results of five decades of LRRR experiments should evidence how delusional their rejection of the Moon landing really is.
[46]The NASA-independent Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, McDonald, Apache Point, and Haleakalā observatories regularly use the Apollo LRRR.
[47] Lick Observatory attempted to detect from Apollo 11's retroreflector while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the Moon but did not succeed until August 1, 1969.
The dark line shows that a large number come back at a specific time, and hence were reflected by something quite small (well under a metre in size).
The concentration of photons at a specific time appears when the laser is aimed at the Apollos 11, 14 or 15 landing sites; otherwise the expected featureless distribution is observed.
[54] Post-Apollo lunar exploration missions have located and imaged artifacts of the Apollo program remaining on the Moon's surface.
[60][61] Comparison of the original 16 mm Apollo 17 LM camera footage during ascent to the 2011 LRO photos of the landing site show an almost exact match of the rover tracks.
The exception is that of Apollo 11, which matches Buzz Aldrin's account of the flag being blown over by the lander's rocket exhaust on leaving the Moon.
NASA also contracted the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, to supplement the three deep space sites, most famously during the Apollo 11 moonwalk as documented by radio astronomer John Sarkissian[65] and portrayed (humorously and not quite accurately) in the 2000 film The Dish.
It would have been relatively easy for NASA to avoid using the Parkes Observatory to receive the Apollo 11 lunar surface television signals by scheduling the moonwalk at an earlier time when the Goldstone station could provide complete coverage.
