201
From a NASA blog post made the day after contact was lost:
The dust storm that is affecting Opportunity has greatly intensified.
The atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover has increased to a record 10.8 on Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018). Power levels on the rover have dropped to a record low of ~22 watt hours. As expected, Opportunity has tripped a low-power ...
172
The articles try to do some sleight-of-hand poorly. It goes on at great length about the accepted Milankovitch cycles (mostly taken straight from the NASA article, the same agency which is supposed to be untrustworthy) to pad its scientific credibility. Then leaps to its conclusion while providing no evidence, instead banging on about conspiracies.
The ...
121
No. The original source of this claim is a satirical news site.
This claim is from an article in World News Daily Report, which carries the following disclaimer in the footer:
World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles ...
120
It seems that he fluffed his line. He meant to say "a man", but inadvertently missed out the "a". It is also possible that the "a" was masked by static.
What did Neil Armstrong really say when he stepped on to the moon?
According to the authors of the 1986 book Chariots for Fire, the astronaut tried to argue it omitted the word ...
94
Opportunity does not literally speak English, so no such message was expressed in those terms. However, Opportunity did communicate the information that it had a low battery and it was dark outside.
The rover's flight software outputs a variety of data formats (summarized in this paper) ranging from "event reports" to telemetry to binary data produced by ...
84
The Twitter thread gives an explicit source for this letter, 'A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong'. by James R. Hansen. This book exists, from Purdue University Press, ISBN 9781557539694
The publisher's blurb says:
Artfully curated by James R. Hansen, A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong is a companion volume to Dear Neil Armstrong: Letters ...
61
More grist for the mill:
Despite his initial adamance that he got the grammar right by
including the indefinite article, Armstrong acknowledged at a 30-year
anniversary event in 1999 that he couldn't hear himself utter the "a"
in the audio recording of his moonwalk transmission, according to the
Associated Press.
But then, in 2006, computer ...
47
Other answers give good technical answers to what the last message would actually have looked like, but I thought it worth tackling the angle of where the quote came from.
Wikipedia cites an article on LAist a Los Angeles local news / blogging site, written by Jacob Margolis.
In it he describes how he coined the phrase:
"My battery is low and it's ...
42
Like most things, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative (i.e. that this didn't happen), but the supposed sources are pretty questionable and the lengths to which things would need to be changed to cover this up rule out any reasonable possibility of this being true.
In reverse order:
4. NASA has lost original recordings of most Apollo 11 mission ...
39
From an archive from NASASpaceflight.com (which is not an official NASA web site), NASA solves YERO problem for shuttle:
By Chris Bergin, 2/19/2007 6:35:00 PM
Shuttle orbiters can now enjoy a happy New Year's Eve on orbit, following the recommendation to implement a YERO (Year End Rollover) solution that was recently designed by NASA engineers.
The ...
39
In a word, no. Weather stations are (as their names suggest) designed for collecting information for weather forecasting (i.e. short term variations in temperature, precipitation etc.), they were never intended for collecting information for climate research (long term statistical behaviour of the weather). As a result, the instruments used tend to have ...
30
People have stepped on the Moon when they went there and left footprints, so we've plenty of photographic evidence of their footsteps on the Moon.
In fact, it turns out that people do leave footprint in dust, even if they weigh less, like a child leaves footprints on Earth while weighing as much as a man on the Moon.
Pictures taken from the Moon itself
The ...
28
No, there is no proof that the Milankovitch Cycle fully explains the current global warming tendencies. The article you linked to includes a sensationalist headline which the article itself makes no attempt to support, and in fact explicitly denies. The headline states:
NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, ...
25
Hughes Aircraft Company received the refund.
A first hand account is given by Bruce Leeds in his article What the Heck is Drawback and How Do I Use It?
Early in my career I took a position as Import Manager at Hughes Aircraft Company, an aerospace company in California. Hughes had imported a small natural diamond window (the size of a penny), from the ...
24
The current answer correctly addresses the truthiness of the claim; but neglects to mention that the satirical article in question from WNDR was actually NOT made up from scratch, but instead cued from an actual news of Bolden's statements in 2015 that discussed aliens and Area 51 (albeit, far less content in his statement, as far as exciting news).
He DID ...
19
In summary;
The cause of death of the Challenger astronauts cannot be positively determined;
The forces to which the crew were exposed during orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury; and
The crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness in the seconds following orbiter breakup due to in-flight loss of crew ...
18
This appears to be a myth that has been repeated in the media. White it is true that whale and sperm oil have been used historically as lubricants, modern synthetic replacements exist from a variety of manufactures to include the Nye Lubricants that is mentioned in various articles as being a provider to NASA of lubricants.
At least three articles have ...
18
@hdhondt's comment on the question made me aware that I totally missed the image is embedded in a thread and it's about the book "A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong" . It seems the letter of the teacher is from 2000, so Neil does indeed mean the Internet. That makes the whole story quite plausible.
17
Yes, NASA refused to pay a littering fine in 1979, BUT it seems that the Shire of Esperance (the municipality in question) never really expected NASA to pay.
First of all, NASA did know about the ticket, and it also clearly shows the ticket was given in jest.
According to It's Only Rocket Science (emphasize mine):
When the US space laboratory, Skylab ...
17
No, it seems that the 528hz claim is either completely made up, or at best based off of recordings artificially adjusted to be heard by humans. The Sun simply doesn't oscillate that quickly or that consistently for the claim to be believable.
Why 528hz is not realistic: Helioseismology is both an awesome word and the research field concerned with studying ...
16
This Metro article cites a tweet by Keri Bean, an engineer who worked on the opportunity mission who had Oppy’s final measurement tattooed on her arm.
This tattoo means more to me than just Oppy. Of course, the biggest significance is this is Oppy’s final measurement. I studied tau (atmospheric optical depth) as a student researcher. Don’t worry, I ...
15
No
The page that you link to only weakly references this NASA page, which in turn is a digital version of a part of a book: Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Volume 18, Supplement 3
The only showing of anything that can be considered a rendering of an alien world such as the Moon or Mars is at the bottom of the page.
The image caption is: ...
14
As people have commented, NASA isn't particularly associated with entomologists, so that seems to be a bit of a red herring and unnecessary appeal to authority. So what if NASA is confused by these bugs? Would it matter if your local mechanic was confused by these bugs? Or a Brain Surgeon?
As was also commented, these species have been identified as Homaemus ...
13
How reliable is that information?
Not reliable at all. The Sunday Sport wikipedia entry says as much:
...It prints plainly ludicrous stories, such as "London Bus Found Frozen In Antarctic Ice", or "World War II Bomber Found On The Moon". Defenders of the paper pointed out that it was not intended to be taken seriously.
They may have a wide audience, ...
11
Is this paragraph truthful?
Yes, but not in the way you think. No CGI was done, merely digital control of still imagery.
The claim:
The visual images for the Apollo trainers [...] moved to an entirely digital control.
Hijacking MichaelK's link to the NASA site, we find this (emphasis mine):
Requirements for realism increase the complexity of the ...
11
They might well have been (even "probably were") alive until impact with the ocean, but it's unknowable whether they were conscious.
Here is a NASA letter whose purpose is to summarize what's known about the deaths of the astronauts.
It's written by "Joseph P. Kerwin" (an astronaut/physician, M.D.). It says (I quote extracts from it below),
The ...
11
Huffington Post shared some explanations about how the photo was captured. The Rover had used ANOTHER arm to capture the selfies. NASA then collated the selfies to produce the image.
Here is the actual selfie taken with the camera from Curiosity's other arm.
10
This is completely bogus.
Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, her name has no results on the NASA website (only Mary Ann Esfandiari does; unrelated).
Taking another look at the book you mention, it is full of claims that are highly implausible (to put it mildly):
There is no evidence for these extraordinary claims. Extraordinary ...
9
From Apollo 11 Moon landing: conspiracy theories debunked
The following reasons have all been offered as proof that the Moon
landings which began with Apollo 11's touchdown on July 20 1969 were
faked.
...
5) The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or
atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if
...
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