201
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
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 ...
- 12k
172
votes
Accepted
Do Milankovitch Cycles fully explain climate change?
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 ...
- 11.1k
121
votes
Accepted
Did NASA director Charles Bolden claim that an alien invasion will happen soon?
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 ...
- 10.1k
120
votes
Neil Armstrong: “One small step for man” or “one small step for a man”?
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 ...
- 15.7k
94
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
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.
...
- 1,138
83
votes
Accepted
Did Neil Armstrong write such a letter to a skeptic?
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 ...
- 5,943
61
votes
Neil Armstrong: “One small step for man” or “one small step for a man”?
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 ...
- 5,516
47
votes
Accepted
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
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 ...
- 5,943
42
votes
Accepted
Did Neil Armstrong find aliens on the moon?
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 ...
- 3,047
39
votes
Were the Space Shuttle's computers incapable of handling end-of-year roll-overs?
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 ...
- 26.2k
30
votes
Accepted
Did astronauts leave footprints on the moon?
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 ...
- 78k
28
votes
Do Milankovitch Cycles fully explain climate change?
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 ...
- 7,448
25
votes
Accepted
Did NASA receive a tax refund on a diamond window when it left the Earth aboard a space probe?
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 ...
- 96.4k
24
votes
Did NASA director Charles Bolden claim that an alien invasion will happen soon?
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 ...
- 31.1k
18
votes
Accepted
Did NASA refuse to pay a $400 fine for littering caused by the deorbiting of Skylab?
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 ...
- 3,854
18
votes
Accepted
Does NASA use whale oil in the Hubble Telescope?
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 ...
- 16.7k
18
votes
Accepted
How long did the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger survive?
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 ...
- 9,012
18
votes
Did Neil Armstrong write such a letter to a skeptic?
@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 ...
- 723
17
votes
Accepted
Does the sound of the Sun oscillate around 528 Hz?
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 ...
- 11.3k
16
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
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. ...
15
votes
Did NASA use CGI for the Apollo mission trainers?
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
...
- 11k
15
votes
Accepted
Is Kim Jong UN a space alien according to new NASA evidence?
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", ...
- 2,077
13
votes
Accepted
Are these bugs baffling entomologists with their appearance and behaviour?
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 ...
- 9,186
11
votes
Did NASA use CGI for the Apollo mission trainers?
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 ...
- 18.8k
11
votes
How long did the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger survive?
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 ...
- 26.2k
11
votes
Did the Curiosity Rover take its own hands-free selfie?
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 ...
- 259
10
votes
Accepted
Is Mary Ann Schinfield a real person?
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 ...
- 17.5k
9
votes
Did astronauts leave footprints on the moon?
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
...
- 38.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible