Confirmation of the Moon landings by
robotic probes independent of NASA
As proof that the Moon is not a Hollywood set sealed off and forgotten in the 1970s, our satellite has recently become the stage of a genuine revival of space exploration, a new renaissance that is literally crowding the lunar surface with international hardware. In addition to the formidable Chinese Chang'e program, in recent years several nations and even private commercial companies have sent their own robotic spacecraft to land on the regolith, providing a continuous, unstoppable stream of data that confirms, line by line, the physics, the topography and the environmental hostility documented by the Apollo program. In August 2023, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made history by landing the Chandrayaan-3 probe, together with the Pragyan rover, at latitudes close to the lunar south pole. The thermal data sent back by this probe confirmed an astonishing geological detail that Apollo scientists had already worked out by analyzing the core samples from Apollo 15, 16 and 17: lunar dust is an exceptional thermal insulator in a vacuum. The Indian probe recorded temperatures of about +50°C at the surface, but just eight centimeters down the temperature plunged to -10°C, independently validating the thermodynamic models of the alien soil created by NASA half a century earlier.
A few months later, in January 2024, it was the turn of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with the SLIM lander (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon). The goal of this mission was to demonstrate the ability to perform an extremely precise landing, a goal achieved thanks to optical navigation software that compared, in real time, the craters seen by the onboard cameras with global elevation maps. Those very maps, paradoxically for the deniers, are direct descendants of the photogrammetric measurements first made from orbit by the Command and Service Modules of the Apollo missions and later refined by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Although the Japanese lander touched down at an unusual angle because of an engine failure in the very last meters of its descent, it released two tiny rovers that photographed the lunar surface as a whole, under the usual pitch-black sky, with its angular basalt boulders and the dusty slopes of Shioli crater. Once again, the landscape captured by the Japanese optics showed no blue skies, humidity or Earth sand, but the same, bleak, arid perfection of the vacuum of space walked on by NASA's astronauts.
NASA's robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), during its in-depth scan of the lunar surface to map it at very high resolution, managed to image all the Apollo landing sites. The LM descent stages, as well as the ALSEP scientific instruments, the American flags, the cameras and the Lunar Rovers, are still clearly visible more than 50 years after the landings. The astronauts' footprints in the lunar regolith and the tracks of the Lunar Rovers' wheels can also still be clearly resolved. Photo courtesy of NASA.
In February 2024, the strictly governmental monopoly on lunar exploration was finally broken by the robotic spacecraft Odysseus (IM-1 mission), built by the American private company Intuitive Machines. This lander, although a commercial venture, had to reckon with the same exact, unforgiving dynamics of spaceflight. Odysseus landed near the Malapert A crater, but because of residual sideways velocity and the deceptive nature of the lunar terrain, it tipped over on its side at touchdown, while stoically managing to transmit scientific data and images. This accident, together with the recent crashes of other robotic probes such as Russia's Luna-25, Japan's Hakuto-R and Israel's Beresheet, turns into the most formidable and elegant demonstration of the greatness of the Apollo program. The fact that modern probes, equipped with artificial intelligence, state-of-the-art laser sensors and processors billions of times more powerful than the onboard computers of the 1960s, struggle to calculate their exact altitude or tip over at touchdown, shows plainly how treacherous the final descent through the vacuum is and that having humans on board to oversee the landing is never a bad choice. It highlights, beyond any shadow of doubt, how titanic and far from guaranteed the achievement of Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad and the other Apollo commanders was: taking manual control in the last moments of flight, they used their eyes, human reflexes and superhuman composure to correct the computer's deviations, dodge boulder fields and gently set down their spacecraft. The convergence of all these modern data destroys the last logical refuge of conspiracy thinking. Japanese, Indian, Chinese organizations and publicly traded private companies are today physically operating in an environment that matches, to the millimeter, from a physical, photographic, optical and mechanical point of view, the typewritten reports and Hasselblad films of 1969. Supposing that NASA staged everything on a set on Earth would mean that the American agency managed, fifty years ago, to guess, by pure clairvoyance, the exact reflectance of the soil, the isotopic composition of the crust, the temperature curves in the absence of an atmosphere and the behavior of the regolith under the weight of the vehicles, creating a fiction so monstrously perfect that it fools today's onboard computers and space scientists all over the planet. The truth, instead, is much simpler and more wonderful: the Apollo saga was real, and today's robots are simply retracing, with digital lenses, the indelible tracks left by the boots of those twelve giants of human history!
