Chinese netizens, fresh off their successful exposure of the South China Tiger photo fraud, turned their sights on the moon photos sent back by the Chang’e probe.
Following an earlier online rumor that suggested that CNSA had lost contact with Chang’e, a theory surfaced in chat rooms that the photo unveiled on 26 November had been copied from an earlier lunar image taken by the NASA. Essentially, netizens were accusing the space agency of covering up the loss of the probe by passing off a Google Moon image as the crowning achievement of the Chang’e I project.
On Sunday, CAS scientist Ouyang Ziyuan denied the rumors by pointing out that the Chinese photo was subtly different from the American one:
Ouyang Ziyuan said that the photos made public by China and by the US were of the same region, so they naturally look similar. But careful examination reveals that the photos taken by China in 2007 and the latest ones confirmed by the US in 2005 have a few small differences.
Ouyang Ziyuan said that recently a Canadian Chinese named Liu Jun carefully compared the two photos and determined that the photo taken by Chang’e I had two small craters in a spot where the American photo showed only one. Professor Ouyang said that the appearance of an additional crater may be due to the insufficient resolution of the American photo, or it could be because a SSSB impacted on the moon between 2005 and 2007.
Additionally, the shadows in the two photos are at different angles, making it even more unlikely that one photo was copied from the other.
Unfortunately for the space program, China’s triumphant lunar photo may actually have a more serious problem. In a thread on the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory BBS, someone going by the name of “Beautiful Eyes” (美的眼睛) presented a convincing argument that errors were made when individual photos were stitched together to form the full image.
The US photo, as obtained from Google Moon, shows a large crater with a smaller crater just inside the left edge, and another small crater just outside the upper-right edge. Chang’e’s photo shows a large crater with a smaller crater inside the left edge, alongside a second large crater with a small crater just outside its upper-right edge.
The pattern of the surrounding craters, as shown in the image at right, is slightly different in the two photos, implying that one of the images does not accurately depict the lunar surface. Of course, the images on Google Moon are also stitched together from many separate photos, so it could very well be that the problem lies with NASA’s images, not with CNSA’s.
However, the 3-dimensional view released by CNSA shows just one crater in that location:
Skyhobby, another commenter in the BBS thread, posted a screenshot of a Photoshop manipulation that realigned the sector in question, bringing it into accord with the Google Moon image:
Conspiracy? Cock-up? Or the Chinese space program catching NASA with its pants down?
- The Beijing News (Chinese): Rumors that the Chang’e moon photos were plagiarized untrue
- Shanghai Astronomical Observatory Online: The new crater that Ouyang Ziyuan noted in the Chang’e moon photo
- Dayoo: Netizen proves stitching error in Chang’e lunar photo