Recently, the discussion around the authenticity of the Apollo moon landing program of the United States has once again become a hot topic on multiple online platforms, and many netizens interpreted the incoherent expression of aerospace experts when mentioning the "Apollo Basin" on the live broadcast as "The Apollo moon landing is a shocking scam".
Regarding the ins and outs of this rumor, the WeChat public account of the China Association for Science and Technology "Scientific Refutation of Rumors" has been sorted out.
On May 14, Wang Junyi, a member of the Youth Working Committee for Space Culture Communication of the China Science and Technology News Society, said that on May 3, the Chang'e-6 lunar probe was successfully launched, and the Chang'e-6 probe launched this time will carry out the first human mission to return samples from the back of the moon. CCTV made a special live broadcast report on the launch, and invited many mission-related experts to interpret science and introduce the mission to the public.
When the rocket has been successfully launched and the flight time is about 2550 seconds, the host and Pei Zhaoyu, deputy chief designer of the third phase of the lunar exploration project, exchanged views on the selection of the landing site of this mission. The host said: "Chang'e-4 landed in the Aitken Basin in Antarctica, and this time Chang'e-6 also landed in the Aitken Basin in Antarctica on a large scale, but in fact, the location is still different. Pei Zhaoyu then said: "I didn't find that...... The ...... in the Apollo Basin" The host noticed that Pei Zhaoyu hadn't organized his language for a while, so he immediately raised a new topic and continued to chat for the sake of the fluency of the live show.
The article pointed out that this was originally a common situation in live broadcast programs, but because Pei Zhaoyu mentioned the words "not found" and "Apollo", some media thought that they had found a "traffic password", and intercepted this conversation separately, and accompanied it with an easily reminiscent title like "About the Aitken Basin in Antarctica, Mr. Pei said: I didn't find that ......", which is easy to resonate, and made a short video for hype. In the comment section below these videos, there was a large number of comments that believed that they had found false evidence of the Apollo moon landing in the United States.
Wang Junyi wrote in the article that the "Aitken Basin" mentioned in the video is located at the south pole of the moon and is known as "one of the largest impact craters in the solar system", which spans the front and back sides of the moon, and there are many basins of different sizes in this large basin, and the controversial "Apollo Basin" in the video is one of the larger ones, which is located on the far side of the moon. Although the name "Apollo Basin" also has "Apollo", it is completely different from the landing site of the Apollo moon landing mission. It was named in honor of the Apollo mission to the moon, and was not the site of any Apollo mission.
Wang Junyi said that there are a large number of audio and video materials on the Apollo lunar mission, and the most important thing is that a large number of lunar soil and lunar rock samples have been brought back to the earth, and many countries around the world have obtained research results based on the lunar soil and lunar rock samples brought back by the Apollo lunar landing mission. In 2012, Zhao Baochang, chief designer of the Chang'e-2 payload subsystem, also mentioned that the images sent back by Chang'e-2 could see the remains of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
In Wang Junyi's view, most people question the Apollo moon landing out of simple feelings for the country, but it is still necessary to call on everyone to maintain rationality, independent thinking ability, and seek truth from facts. And those media that deliberately misinterpret the meaning of aerospace experts, take advantage of the simple emotions of ordinary people, edit and piece together content to "earn traffic" and "attract attention", really shouldn't, and I advise this kind of media to accept the heart of "traffic is king".
Regarding the U.S. Apollo moon landing program, according to the official website of the China National Space Administration, on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft departed, and the lunar module landed on the lunar surface on July 20. After nearly seven hours of waiting, Ni Armstrong stepped onto the moon at 22:56:20 EST on the 20th and uttered the famous phrase that will forever go down in history: "It's a small step for a man, but a leap for humanity." Later, Al Aldrin also stepped onto the moon. By December 1972, five more Apollo spacecraft had sent 10 people to the moon. They carried out many scientific expeditions and experiments on the lunar surface, bringing back more than 300 kilograms of lunar material.
In fact, the popular science China network sponsored by the China Association for Science and Technology has repeatedly refuted the rumors of Apollo's moon landing fraud.
For example, an article published by Popular Science China in 2018 said that there are four main grounds for people's doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo moon landing: First, the surface of the moon is vacuum, why is the American flag fluttering in the wind when astronauts plant the American flag on the surface of the moon? Second, there is only one light source from the sun on the moon, so why do some astronauts have two shadows? Third, the projection of astronauts of different heights is about the same height, indicating that there is an artificial light source intervening; Fourth, Armstrong's footprints on the moon are so clear that they may have been artificially faked.
Regarding these four questions, Academician Ouyang Ziyuan, the "father of Chang'e", refuted them one by one. He mentioned that the shaking of the national flag is caused by inertia, when the astronauts put the national flag on the surface of the moon, due to the instability of their own center of gravity to cause the flag to shake, and the moon does not have air resistance like the earth, so the shaking will last for a long time; The problem of ghosting is caused by landers, which are made of metal materials and have multiple refractive surfaces, which reflect sunlight at different angles, resulting in ghosting. The height problem is caused by the uneven surface of the moon, and if the shadow "passes" through a large crater, it appears to be "shorter" in the photograph; The problem of shoe prints is that the surface of the moon is mostly powdered minerals, and the friction coefficient of the rough powder surface is large.
Since then, the popular science China network has published many articles, giving scientific explanations one by one for the views on the false rumors of the Apollo moon landing.
In 2023, in a popular science video broadcast by Popular Science China Network, Jia Yang, deputy chief designer of the lunar and Mars rover, said that he had heard similar doubts more than 20 years ago, and he made a simple explanation from a more macro level, saying, "A project involving hundreds of thousands of people, in fact, it is quite difficult to cheat, and I firmly believe that the Apollo moon landing is real." ”
"The tech world doesn't seem to be bothering to answer that question right now...... They (the skeptics) have come up with a lot of things that are inconsistent with our daily phenomena, which can be explained scientifically, and we have explained them many times, including the problem of footprints, the problem of multiple shadows, etc. Pang Zhihao, chief science communication expert of national space exploration technology, said, "A large number of the results of their (Apollo program) exploration can only be obtained on the moon, and more than 300 kilograms of things (lunar rock samples) collected are all things on the moon." He finally joked, "It's harder to fake than to fake." (Surging News reporter Jiang Ziwen)
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