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Rant: spent 7 months in a deep hole because the moon landing 'proof' I found was backwards
I was convinced I'd cracked the whole moon landing thing after finding a database of NASA telemetry data from 1969. Thought I had this rock solid argument about signal delays proving they faked it from a studio in Nevada. Took me 7 months of digging and cross referencing old radio logs to realize I was reading the time stamps in the wrong format entirely. The data was actually showing the real delay from the moon's orbit, not a fake signal. Now I feel like a complete idiot and I'm never trusting my first read of raw data again. Has anyone else spent forever on a theory only to find out you messed up the basic facts?
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the_margaret23d ago
Read somewhere that even the Apollo engineers had to double check their own timestamps constantly.
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faithwalker23d ago
That thing about the hour and minute fields being swapped really hit home for me. I used to mess around with old weather satellite data from the 70s and ran into the same kind of nonsense where the timecode was stored in some weird split format with the seconds before the minutes. What finally worked for me was building a little cheat sheet on a sticky note that I taped to my monitor with the exact byte positions labeled. I'd glance at it every single time before I did anything with the timestamps, even if I was just copying them into a spreadsheet. It sounds stupid but repeating that check out loud to myself saved my butt more times than I can count. Those old engineers definitely liked to make things complicated on purpose, I swear.
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Wait, were you working with the raw timecodes in some kind of NASA format like GMT or were you mixing up the delay from the signal path with the actual time stamp on the data packet? Because I gotta tell you, I've been down that exact same rabbit hole with old space data and it's brutal how easy it is to flip the numbers around. I spent a good three months trying to prove the Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosion was staged because I was reading a pressure sensor log backwards, only to find out the format was reversed from what I assumed. The whole thing made me feel like such a moron when I finally looked at a diagram of the data structure and saw the hour and minute fields were swapped for some reason. It's like these engineers from the 60s just wanted to mess with future researchers or something, you know?
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