Published in Graphics

Nvidia proves that the lunar landings happened

by on22 September 2014



So much for the conspiracy hoax

Nvidia says that it has killed off one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history – that the Apollo moon landings were faked. A virtual re-creation of the Apollo 11 landing site Nvidia debunk persistent hoax claims about the moon landings. Nvidia wanted to show off a lighting feature of its new GeForce GTX 970 and 980 cards and thought that the moon shot was a way to test it. 

Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager said that global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company. Virtual point lights don't do a bad job when the environment stays the same, but a game developer has to fake shadows, fake reflections...it's a labor-intensive process," he said.

An Nvidia research engineer used the company's new dynamic lighting techniques to show off a side-by-side comparison between an Apollo 11 photo and a GeForce-powered re-creation.

"We're going to debunk one of the biggest conspiracies in the world," Herkelman said.

nvidia-lunar

Voxel global illumination, however, proves the conspiracy nuts wrong, says Nvidia. The technique, which the new GTX 970 and 980 can tap into, lets developers use dynamic lighting that will bounce, diffuse and reflect in real-time with unprecedented fidelity when new objects are added to a scene. Nvidia's GPUs are enhanced chips that allow graphics cards to more effectively and efficiently take data from a central processing unit, or CPU, and turn it into moving images on a display. Moon landing hoaxes often use as evidence for their claims lighting discrepancies with NASA photography. However what Nvidia got was a near-perfect replication of the 1969 Apollo 11 landing site.

For example the hoax that astronaut Buzz Aldrin couldn't have been illuminated when descending the ladder to the moon's surface if he was hidden from the sun by the spacecraft. Nvidia discovered that there were two key factors, both of which could be addressed using voxel global illumination. First, the moon's surface is comprised of what are essentially thousands of tiny mirrors -- moon dust if you will -- that bounce light back at a viewer.

Nvidia discovered the suit could bounce a ton of light. So they dropped in Armstrong, adjusted his suit's reflectivity and found that they were able to re-create the scene realistically. The lack of stars in the sky, which is a big part of the conspiracy theory was because the astronauts were using cameras with smaller apertures, meaning less light was streaming in during the on-site photographing.

With a smaller aperture, the astronauts could photograph astronauts themselves and the reflective surface of the moon, but they removed the stars. If you up rate the aperture of a virtual photo to let in more light, Nvidia found that you could see space but not the astronauts.

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