Smoking Gun #6 -
The next claim, shown here, is in relation to the landing sequence for Surveyor 3. He has read in the reports (which he does not doubt) that Surveyor bounced several times before settling into place. We know these bounces initial landing bounces were some distance from the final resting spot. His issue is the set of pad imprints from landing event 3 (and I do hope he isn’t assuming that the three pad imprints are the from the big bounces on the way to it).
They key word is “event”. Nowhere has anyone in NASA claimed it just landed and done. This page records how it “bounced about one foot” during that event.
Rasa’s claim is that the imprints photographed by Apollo somehow defy the laws of physics, and they did some sort of drop to make them that went wrong.
He even claims that the Apollo 12 crew deliberately scuffed over the imprints to hide them when taking photographs, which is a bit dumb considering they photographed them a lot before that, and published those photographs in publicly available documents like this, and this, (both of which I have copies) and included the photos in packs available to the public , like this one that I own.
For Rasa to be correct, two things need to be true. Firstly, the pad imprints are ot recorded in the documentation about Surveyor, and the pads shouldn’t match the Apollo photos. Let’s see.
The Surveyor 3 preliminary report (again, I own a copy) discusses the landing event, and the imprints in detail. The nature of the imprints, their depth and distribution gave important clues about the nature of the surface on which it landed, so of course they’re going to discuss it. The report discusses how:
“The imprint is composed of two truncated conical depressions superimposed one on another, the bottom of the imprint being quite flat.”
The report also discusses a fourth imprint, detected in the telemetry, and which it identifies in the photographs taken by the probe.
It describes the first two clear impression, identifies one underneath the footpad as the fourth and a third one
“Just beyond the and to the right of the center of the footpad”
I’ve annotated one of the photographs used below.
So, far from being “not possible according to any laws of physics” the actual scientists with actual PhDs discuss the physics of it in great detail, coming up with perfectly reasonable explanations of the process based on photographic and telemetry evidence, rather than a complete ignorance of any of those things.
So far so good. Can we see any of these features in the Apollo 12 photographs? Below is a section of the Apollo image used, rotated and stretched to match approximately with the Surveyor image. I’ve identified the same features in each one.
The two red arrows point to features specifically referenced in the report, as is the “waffle iron” imprint. Reproducing a couple of imprints is one thing, reproducing every crack and clod of earth associated with them is quite another.
The camera was also capable of photographing another of the footpads, number 3, and we also have an Apollo photograph of that.
While it’s difficult to see any details from within the imprint in the Apollo photograph, the rock is there in absolutely perfect detail, in terms of its position in relation to the pad, it’s shape, and the markings on it
To summarise:
No, the imprints recorded by Apollo 12 aren’t impossible. They are perfectly consistent with the recorded data. The imprints themselves are a perfect match with the original images, to an extent that would be physically impossible to recreate.
