Let's see:
<conspiracy_nut_mode>
- the Indians are conspiring with the Americans
- the Americans have interfered with the transmissions from the satellite
- subtheory 1: they have planted a spy in the place
where the satellite was assembled and tampered with
the software
- an American satellite in orbit around earth
messed with the image in transit
</conspirace_nut_mode>And that's without trying really hard.
And by having all these people falling over each other to say that this 'rubbishes' the claims of the conspiracy theorists they're giving those idiots way too much credibility, the best thing to do is to ignore them. Post the pictures (which none of those sites do, by the way!) in as high a resolution as you've got and let the rest of the world enjoy them. The nutters will do their thing anyway.
The Chandrayaan satellite is a pretty good way for India to show the world that they have a space presence, it can do all kinds of useful stuff, let's not diminish it by just using it to give attention to a bunch of people that really don't deserve any.
The media are very much complicit in giving these fools airtime, let's see them give airtime to Chandrayaan without being tied in to that nonsense.
- If you can already go into space what's so hard about landing on the moon?
- The Soviet Union would have been all over it in 1969 to score points if the US had faked it.
- People shouldn't mix up Capricorn One with reality. Particularly as they couldn't keep the astronauts in the movie quiet.
Nutcases thrive when you give them a platform, this not only gives them yet another reason to get plenty of airtime but makes it worse by actively addressing them instead of just ignoring them. They're now 'officially' part of the game, instead of relegated to the fringe where they belong.
'Moonlandings', 'hoax', an article that makes claims without the image to back it up, great factors for a bunch of stories in a slow news month, this will get plenty of airplay.
It's a bleeding tragedy that the focus of the Chandrayaan images is debunking a conspiracy theory, as opposed to more 'useful' purposes. Ordinarily I would put that down to the Times of India being its usual sensationalist self, but in this case, the damn ISRO scientist is the one giving sound bytes (and even a paper!) about the 'veracity of the Apollo 15 mission'.