MythBusters ~ Moon Landing Wasn't A Hoax

Today on Far Future Horizons we join Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts of Discovery Channel’s hit television series “MythBusters”, in laying to rest the myth that the Apollo moon landings were a staged hoax.

The MythBusters chose Marshall as one of several NASA locations for an episode to debunk the notion that NASA never landed on the moon.
The cast conducted tests involving a feather, a weight, a lunar soil boot print, and a flag in a vacuum. A team of Marshall scientists helped with the tests.

The MythBusters built a small scale replica of the lunar landing site with a flat surface and a single distant spotlight to represent the Sun. They took a photo and all the shadows in the photo were parallel, as the myth proposed.
They then adjusted the topography of the model surface to include a slight hill around the location of the near rocks so the shadows fell on a slope instead of a flat surface. The resulting photograph had the same shadow directions as the original NASA photograph from Apollo 14.

To test this, they built a much larger scale (1:6) replica of the landing site, including a dust surface with a colour and albedo similar to lunar soil.

The MythBusters then took a photograph which was nearly identical to the original NASA photo from Apollo 11. The MythBusters explained that the astronaut was visible because of light being reflected off the Moon’s surface.

This episode of Mythbusters can be purchased from Amazon Instant Video. 

MythBusters: Moon Landing Wasn’t a Hoax

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