Dear rick55: I appreciate and applaud your wish to expose in easy, arithmetical terms the absurdities of NASA's tales. You may agree, however, that there are a great many ways (other than arithmetics) to achieve this - with even simpler arguments based on logic and common sense. The (techno-scientific) way you seem to pursue is laudable, but I fear most people's first objections thrown at you will be: "are you a rocket scientist? A space engineer? No? So what do you know?"
Having said that, I encourage anyone to pursue his/her own way of waking up the public to NASA's outrageous and ongoing hoaxes. There is no magical, "one-size-fits-all" teaching process to do so. Therefore, let's stay respectful of each other's best efforts to achieve this end.
Simon... just for the record here, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Universities teach math and science the same way in Canada and the U.S. Calculus is calculus. Physics is physics. We're all using the same textbooks in university/college. Common sense is absolutely and definitively not what we're going to use to prove a hoax since most people's common sense is telling them that NASA landed this craft on Mars. So common sense is the last thing you want to use here. Sense perception is notoriously unreliable. A minimum level of college numeric literary is going to be required here, otherwise we're going to end up swatting flies. I want to nail this and so we have to choose our most effective audience-- numerate college math/physics trained Americans. To suggest otherwise baffles me.
Identity issues such as being a piano player rather a rocket scientist do not matter in this hoax exposee-- either to MSM or to the audience we ought to prove this hoax to because the internet makes all referencing and source material and contacts easy. Only an entertaining writing style, numeracy and graphic illustrations count today when proving something right or wrong. I judge an article by how it reads first and foremost-- only checking the background of the writer later if I have to. "Most people" are not who we ought to be proving the hoax to. College/university educated numerate/literates who are able to have intelligent conversation are who we're concerned with... who have a feel for US/Canada culture. To steer this otherwise is too big a job right now.
In point of fact, there IS a teaching process that is universal. And it's well established in America in the university/college system. Education and media, like a lot of things, are cultural artifacts. Ignoring that component of the proof-of-hoax, is going to lead us into another 9/11 artificial reality where people continue to think we have landers on Mars. I cannot believe -- or allow myself to believe - that there is NOT a universal proof of a hoax in the case of the Mars lander, or for the the 9/11 psyop and the Apollo missions for that matter. For Apollo, for me, the universal proof is in the inability of the craft to disappate heat in the barbecue roll.
We could construct a universal proof right here in this forum. We would construct a type of Wikipedia cooperatively written article. In fact, for the one-size-fits-all PRO-mythical version of the "story", the CIA-funded Wikipedia just MIGHT be the place where the debunkers like us could start!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory
If we here, including you, could use the specific references of the Wikipedia propaganda in the debunking, we'd accomplish something that would be, by its very definition, presentable to a CIA agent as proof that he or she is behaving in a treasonous manner by pretending we landed a craft on Mars. We ought to speak his or her language. The Wikipedia article is fitting material for college/university level people in the US and Canada and... it is culturally understood and popular enough for the purpose we would intend.
For example, on the matter of the parachute which first caught my attention, the WIKI-CIA-Pedia... says
The landing sequence alone required six vehicle configurations, 76 pyrotechnic devices, the largest supersonic parachute ever built, and more than 500,000 lines of code, in a final sequence that was dubbed "seven minutes of terror" by NASA.[58]
Fancy that! --we used "the LARGEST supersonic parachute ever built". Earlier Heiwa wrote
Heiwa
The force (Newton) acting on the parachute so it brakes is, e.g. quite big, so the chute may heat up and burn or simply rip apart. I suggest no such strong parachute exists and JPL can easily show that I am wrong by presenting the magic chute.
Culturally, Heiwa insists on using Newtons of force but the Wiki page uses pounds when describing the strength of the parachute here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MSL_parachute.jpg
In this image, two engineers are dwarfed by the parachute, which holds more air than a 280-square-meter (3,000-square-foot) house and is designed to survive loads in excess of 36,000 kilograms (80,000 pounds).
The chute was built by Pioneer Aerospace, South Windsor, Connecticut.
http://www.pioneeraero.com/
The Director of Engineering is Jerry Rowan.
[email protected]
The Wiki article doesn't say what the chute is made out of. I'll email Jerry Rowan and ask, and report back here.