April 28, 2016

IMAGE: Object in lunar orbit not Command Module? 

This photo has been lurking in one of my download files for several years, and wasn't deleted because it had no Apollo image number to check it against. I always suspected a hoax but had other things on my plate. Once we set up a Yahoo email list for The Lunascan Project things started to happen and some dialogue started concerning some Apollo anomalies.

Then in the last few days Mike Garuto brought it up and I decided it was time to do some detective work.  I usually can Google up images that lead to sources, but this one didn't come up with any searches I had tried. I've seen other Command Modules in lunar orbit but they were different on the top, and if taken in orbit and not photoshopped in, this image would have had to have been shot from the LEM or the real CM. But the image we were stuck with didn't match any of those I had seen of the CM and there were no antennas that are needed for communication and other telemetry during the most critical period in the mission, the rendezvous.

Rob Duvall was also suspicious. He said that it looked like a turned and machined 6061 part to him. He had seen and designed many parts like this for fuel flow and metering applications. He said he would bet money that the object was not part of the original image.

I knew when I first saw it that we had to find the original image that would (or would not) have the object in it. I tried other search words until I found the image and along with that the clue that it had been taken during Apollo 10. The search began with the images in Apollo 10's 70mm Hasselblad film magazine. There were 9 magazines with 1436 images to go over, and I set out to find the area in the photo. Within an hour I had located it, and had downloaded the highest resolution version available. The oblique view of the Moon's surface was photographed by the Apollo 10 astronauts in May of 1969. Center point coordinates are located at 13 degrees, 3 minutes east longitude and 7 degrees, 1 minute north latitude. One of the Apollo 10 astronauts attached a 250mm lens and aimed a handheld 70mm camera at the surface from lunar orbit for a series of pictures in this area. Cutting across the center of this image from the Apollo 10 is the Rima Ariadaeus, a linear rille. The crater to the south of the rille in the left half of the image is Silberschlag.  The dark patch at the top right is the floor of Boscovitch crater. But there was no UAO!!!! The UAO photo of a silvery object over the moon during an Apollo mission was a hoax.

The real AS10-31-4646 image (NASA)
Section 34 (The Lunascan Project)