Robert Morningstar on C2C last night

(revised with thanks to 'Trekker' who corrected my first draft)

       Robert Morningstar describes himself as a "civilian intelligence analyst." I think he's a buffoon in the mold of Hoagland & Bara. He says this Apollo image shows a crashed spacecraft on the far side of the Moon:

        The craters in that frame don't have names, but the nearest named craters are Diderot and Delporte. Judging by their known diameters (20 km and 45 km respectively,) the "object" is about 10 km long.

        My message to Morningstar, Hoagland, Bara: IT ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH to show a 40 year old image whose resolution might  be ~25 m/px, and fail to examine the far better images in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image library. Here is one of them, from the WAC* to confirm that the same craters are nearby. The crashed spacecraft is in the center of that frame, and looks less like an object and more like a depression.

       That was at 125 m/px. Zooming to 8 brings in the NAC* image and the feature fills the frame.  Oh look --  a 10 km long spacecraft with craters on it!

       Morningstar says this is an Apollo 12 image, but in fact it's from the Apollo 15 pan camera, and therefore would have had a resolution of ~2 m/px. It's frame number AS15-P-9625¹, one of a stereo pair (with 9630.) Here it is, folks.

Artillery fire
        By the way, Morningstar's discussion of paired lunar craters of the exact same size was too precious for words. There are too many of these to be natural, he asserted. Artillery fire is a more likely explanation. George Noory didn't bat an eyelid.

        Friar Occam, you're needed on the overnight radio. AGAIN.

Cockpit voice recorders
        Data Storage Equipment (DSE) was installed in all Apollo Command Modules (and DSEA in Lunar Modules) from Apollo 8 on. The equipment recorded conversation among the crews, and could be dumped at high speed to the ground whenever Mission Control wanted. The point was to have a record of crew conversation while the spacecraft were behind the Moon, just in case something went wrong. Morningstar mentioned this as though he'd just personally discovered this Great Secret, eliding the fact that it's been well discussed on Internet forums for many years now. He made a total ass of himself by stating that the DSE was installed "without the crews' knowledge." Oh dear, oh dear.

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[1] The P is not an identifier of the film magazine, as Morningstar alleged. It identifies the pan camera (details here, if anyone's interested.) He was also wrong in stating that NASA identifies Apollo film magazines by a single letter. The ID was a number-letter combo.

Update: The Lunar and Planetary Institute does actually use letter-only mag IDs, and there is in fact a magazine P in their nomenclature. However, the filenames of the images themselves follow NASA practice and use a number. So it's still true that AS15-P-9625 means the Apollo 15 pan camera, not mag P.

* WAC and NAC mean Wide Angle Camera and Narrow Angle Camera, on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter