Picture above: Excessive-resolution, digital scan of a full body from the unique Apollo sixteen movie showing the article in query (top heart) and its position relative to the moon. Reflections in the window are additionally seen (left and right). Credit: NASA
Beginning their return from the moon to an April 27, 1972, splashdown, Astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke captured about four seconds of video footage of an object that seemed to look lots like Hollywood's model of a spacecraft from one other world.
Image on right: Picture enhancement of the object and linear feature. Credit: NASA
The thing was described as "a saucer-shaped object with a dome on top." The photographs had been captured with a 16mm movement image camera shooting at 12 frames per second from a command/service module window. The item seems momentarily close to the moon. Because the digital camera pans, it strikes out of the sector of view. It reappears because the digicam pans back. It appeared in about 50 frames.
Some very bright individuals lately labored laborious to research that footage. Their conclusion was that the item wasn't at all what some observers thought it seemed to be. There is not any such thing as a indication the Apollo 16 crew ever thought the movie confirmed something special.
A gaggle headed by Gregory Byrne of Johnson Space Center's Image Science and Evaluation Group accomplished a report on its investigation earlier this year. They used a video copy of the movie initially, then did a excessive-decision digital scan of the original film for detailed analysis.
Picture on left: View of the Apollo Command/Service Module from the Lunar Module throughout Apollo 17 showing the location of the EVA floodlight/boom. Credit: NASA
They stabilized photographs to correct for camera movement, and then aligned a number of frames in a sequence. One factor that showed them was that the item appeared to move slightly with respect to the moon, because of parallax led to by slight camera motions and the nearness of the article to the camera.
The investigators additionally mixed a quantity of frames in a sequence, to offer them larger resolution and better contrast than particular person frames. The combinations confirmed them more clearly a "linear function" attached to one aspect of the object. Additionally they checked out archived pictures from different Apollo missions.
Backside line: "The entire proof on this analysis is in step with the conclusion that the article in the Apollo 16 movie was the EVA [spacewalk] floodlight/boom. There isn't a proof within the photographic record to counsel otherwise."
