I cant resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust. ...http://www.badastronomy.......
That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.
I can't resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust. ..."
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxap…
Remember that a rocket exhust behaves very differently on earth from the way it does in airless space. Even the comparison between the lift-off of the first stage of a Saturn V compared with the ignition of the second stage a little while later gives you an idea of the difference. The hot gas is able to spread out much more in space than it does on earth. That is part of your explanation.
Another part is that the rocket engine was not firing right down to the point at which the descent module was sitting where you see it in the photograph. It cut out some distance above the surface. Remember the silhouette of the probe UNDER the foot pad of the module as the Eagle came in to land. WHen that probe struck the surface, the engine shut down. It was abloe to do so because the legs contined shock-absorbers, and because lunar gravity is so feeble.
The third relevant factor I can think of off-hand is that there is no wind to blow the dust away, so lots of it would settle back pretty much where it came from once the engine shut down.
By the way, the total mass of the LEM was about 15 tonnes - but that included the fuel burned in the descent. By the time that fuel was gone, the LEM would have mass of around 7 tonnes only, which, after allowing for the effect of lunar gravity, would come down to about the weight of a sub-compact car.
