3D printing has now been established as a great way for paying tribute to famous historical moments, as artists have begun 3D printing memorabilia ranging from a coin featuring the face of Chuck Hull to a long, tubular mp3 player that plays out the Barack Obama SOTU speech in which he mentions the technology. Most recently, imgur user taposk has commemorated our first ever trip to the moon using additive manufacturing by recreating Neil Armstrong’s famous lunar footstep.
Before you go about 3D printing something, you need a 3D model. 3D scanning hadn’t been invented yet in 1969, but stereoscopy had. Interestingly, taposk was able to create a 3D image of the famous footprint using a pair of stereoscopic images, which the user was then able to translate into a 3D model through “point cloud computing” and “experimental algorithms”.
The resulting mesh made in meshlab was a bit noisy, so taposk cleaned it up using Zbrush.
Finally, taposk 3D printed the model over the course of an hour on a Z310 3D printer, with a layer height of about 0.083mm. Of course, the print was only a scale representation of the actual footprint, but as far as translating moon footage to a physical model goes, you’ve got to give taposk some credit.
This isn’t the only time that stereoscopy has been used in studies of the moon landing. Oleg Oleynik, a Ph.Dc graduate from Kharkov State University in Ukraine, believes that, through the study of stereoscopic images from the Apollo 15 landing, “the Apollo 15 photographic record does NOT depict real lunarscapes with distant backgrounds located more than a kilometre away from the camera. These pictures were, without doubt, taken in a studio set.” Personally, I don’t believe in Moon landing conspiracies, as they detract attention away from authentic alien abduction conspiracies and the fact that the president is a simulacrum, but then again, I use a generic brand aluminium foil for my cap, while most legitimate conspiracy theorists buy Reynolds.
Actually, these conspiracies may have arisen because, since 1972, we haven’t sent a single person to the Moon. The only explanation for that, to some, may be that the original landing never happened in the first place. More realistically, however, the reason we haven’t landed a person on Mars, Europa, or any of the other fun places in our Solar System, is because, as a species we’re too distracted by the pursuit of superficial rewards and superstition to apply our awesome cognitive powers towards technology that would actually make life fun and meaningful. I bet that, when Neil Armstrong uttered the words “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, he hadn’t thought mankind’s leap would turn out to be so small.
Source: imgur
