California Woman Who Tried to Sell a Moon Rock Wins Round Against NASA

San Jose Mercury News ^ | April 14, 2017 | Liam Truchard

[nickcarraway]

Joann Davis had a moon rock. Yes, it was real. A gift, she said, from Neil Armstrong to her late husband.

She also had an ill son and the Lake Elsinore resident wanted to help with his medical care. So she contacted NASA about her intention to sell it.

That led to a nightmare situation on May 19, 2011, when Davis stood in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in pants soaked in urine, answering questions from a federal agent about a rice-sized piece of moon.

“He kept saying, ‘You will be going to federal court, you will be going to federal jail,’ ” Davis said Friday.

An indignant federal appeals court on Thursday criticized Davis’ detention by NASA agent Norman Conley in the Denny’s parking lot, calling it “unreasonably prolonged and unnecessarily degrading.”

Conley detained Davis even though he knew she was nearly 75 years old, had urinated in her pants during the sting, had reached out to NASA herself and was having financial problems, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court was “determining whether a federal agent could be sued for wrongful detention under these circumstances,” said Davis’ Redlands-based lawyer, Peter Schlueter. And their decision was “absolutely, yes.”

Lunar material gathered on the Apollo missions is considered government property, and her email prompted an investigation that brought six armed officers to the Denny’s that day in a sting operation to seize the rock.

Instead of asking Davis to surrender the rock to NASA, Conley “organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother,” 9th Circuit Chief Judge Sidney Thomas wrote.

[CARTOUCHE]

Mental masturbation has made you blind. I suggest you curb your conspiracy porn surfing.

[TheCipher]

Jeesh. Everybody knows that Armstrong wasn't the first man on the moon !!!

The Old Negro Space Program

[TheCipher]

Here is a true story of someone who actually stole moon rocks:

Sex on the Moon

[IronJack]

Have your psychiatrist do a med check, okay?

[Campion]

The shielding that would have been required to protect three astronauts from the Van Allen Belt radiation was estimated to require an inch thick of lead

Only if you sit in the Van Allen Belt for an extended period of time; radiation doses are cumulative over a period of time. Apollo flew through them at 29k mph.

As far as the "workmanship" on the LEM, would it be safe to say you've never been involved in an engineering project? I have. I helped to build some of the first digital cellphones back in the 1980's and early 90's. The first prototype model didn't fit in your pocket, and it didn't fit (very well) in a car trunk, either. It was the size of a dorm room refrigerator.

The LEM, and most other Apollo hardware, was also basically an engineering prototype that went into production, not a finished piece of consumer hardware that was produced by the millions.

The LEM team's task was to build something that met Apollo's strict weight requirements and could land on the moon, not something that would look pretty sitting on shelf and sell millions of units.

[winodog]

Keep telling the truth.

[Bogie]

Gee, just give them a call. They are in business to make money and the widmanstaetten pattern is clearly nickel iron meteorite.And after you have been married for a long time they have interesting jewelry too. I have a bolo tie with a Canyon Diablo chunk on the clasp, that my father loved and now I do too. A great way to start a conversation at a party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widmanst%C3%A4tten_pattern

[redgolum]

We didn’t go back for a simple reason. There was no benefit to going there. None.

I love space opera, but thermodynamics is a cruel lady. Simply put, there is nothing up there than can be brought back at a reasonable cost.

[Bogie]

Great Sagan quote! Thanks.

[Stentor]

I almost passed out laughing. Warning necessary.

[coloradan]

I will probably regret doing this, but:
1. The fact the craft looks low quality doesn’t prove it didn’t exist or didn’t fly.
2. Stars are very much dimmer than a sunlit scene; to see stars in a photograph requires seconds if not minutes of exposure, while day-lit scenes can be captured in 1/500 of a second or less.
3. As a result of perspective, the shadows of objects go in different directions, which is conspicuous in fisheye lens photographs. Notice that the shadow of the photographer in this picture is almost directly straight up, but the shadow of the distant surfer is clearly to his right. https://www.dpreview.com/files/p/articles/2361078034/Phogo_fisheye.JPG
4. It is a well-known effect that one sees a halo or brightness around the shadow of one’s head, because, in that direction, the shadows of objects are obscured by the objects casting the shadows. http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2005/07dec05/Zinkova.jpg?PHPSESSID=1hplpeaa73r4f2vs3f7shaqb63
5. The Earth is a sphere, so, at any significant distance, it will look like a circle. But, how much of the surface of Earth that circle covers depends on one’s distance; it only covers half of the surface at infinite viewing distance. One certainly can’t see both South and North America from the altitude of a jet plane. Indeed, the Space Station is only a few hundred miles up, which is not nearly far enough to see all of North America and South America in the same scene.

As I say, I hope I don’t regret this.

[rx]

I appreciate your effort at putting forth things that would honestly endeavor to get to the truth of the matter at hand. I'm not--as are self-evidently several here--eager to exact a price for anyone's expression of a divergent opinion. Such people apparently have little appreciation for the negativity they introduce, which would stifle needed, healthy debate that is interested in the merits of any argument. I would not try to make you regret anything you say.

Although it's true that the low quality of a craft's appearance does not necessarily prove it didn't exist or fly, one needs to ask oneself whether, given, for example, the Grissom, Chaffee and White Apollo 1 episode, that Americans would have been of a mindset to be so cavalier as to send up a craft that manifested those irregularities and true shortcomings. In those images are literally pieces of tape "holding down" significant coverings. Does that result comport with a thought of, "If I don't do this right, my astronaut-friends could die a horrible death as the craft endured the stresses of accelerations and decelerations?" I don't think so. What quality assurance engineer at Grumman would have allowed his signature beside the sign-offs? At most, a quality assurance engineer that would know there was no life-criticality to such a taped closure.

The silver-foil-like insulation not being used throughout the outer surface does prove that it was not being relied on for shielding through any Van Allen Belt (VAB). A later Challenger flight that got no closer than 350 miles to the VAB generated shared astronaut experiences of "shooting star-like visions," apparently of radiation whizzing through their improved (over Apollo) shielding, with those particles literally passing through their bodies and through their retinas. Apollo astroNOTS going through the VAN for any length of time at all would have necessarily been harrowing if not deadly, particularly given that there was no significant shielding on that Lunar Module pictured. Yet, none of the astroNOTs even mentioned anything about VAB traversal. It think that's the one main reason the Soviets--though they were well ahead of the Americans in almost every measure of space flight--dared to risk such a venture.

I'll grant that the nature of perspective (vis-a-vis shadows) is not obvious to many people and sometimes downright difficult always to discern. The wooded example you put forth suffers from a lack of orthogonality that could aid in discerning the true direction of the shadows on the left. It does properly show that the light source is behind the apparent photographer's head, hence the hot spot. The fish eye (beach) example is already dissimilar from the Hasselblad moon pix, thus of no real comparative use, IMHO. Please consider dealing with the faked moon rock issue.

Although there will be some variation in the size of objects in a hemispheric capture, those differences would have to be very near-distance captures to manifest what you're talking about. None of those NASA images were asserted to have been captured by low-flying jets or by craft in low earth orbit.

Consider the obvious fakery in which NASA was willing to engage in the following example. It's the same, apparently human-crafted prop moon "rock," labeled "C". Once the anomaly was caught and "repaired," the other time not:

As I say, I hope I haven't made you regret anything.

[bgill]

Hey, Obummer gave guns and ammo to the Dept. of Education back when he was buying up all the ammo so citizens couldn’t get any.

[rx]

Will do, as long as the Lord gives me breath.
Thanks!

[rx]

How about the double exposed reticules in the following? This should have been an impossiblity. It wasn't impossible, but they just didn't do the fakery well.

Or how about the thruster that slowed down the LM's descent? Prior to the launch, there was concern it might create such a hole in the surface that the craft might tip into it. Meh, that apparently wasn't a problem. No thruster hole or blast area to be discerned at all! Neither did any dust whatsoever get blowing into the landing gear foot pod. Errrr!

[rx]

Pristine, in close-up: (cleaner than the Rover's solar panels being brought back to life after "getting dusted by aliens")

[MarkL]

Why does NASA have guys with guns?

Probably for the same reason that NOAA has guns too... And both have LOTS of ammunition!

But probably to protect us from this guy.

Mark

[MarkL]

Because you never know when someone is going to try to take a moon rock.

Moon rock? This guy took the whole moon!

Mark

[Lurker]

“criticized Davis’ detention by NASA agent Norman Conley”

I’d have left Norman bleeding in the parking lot.

L

[Cementjungle]

My friend, an inventor of certain 3D microscope technology, was loaned some moon dust from Apollo 11 a few years back. NASA hand delivered it to him at his home in Hawaii. He did some pretty cool images from that:

http://sandgrains.com/Moon-Sand-Grains-Gallery.html