The discrepancy ledger — where the Apollo 11 primary record disagrees with itself

A systematic register of places where the library’s primary sources state conflicting values for the same fact — between documents, and in several cases within a single document. This complements, and does not duplicate, two other audits in this collection: Memory vs. record (the 2001 oral history against 1969), and One moment, three records (transcription divergences between the voice records). Sections E–F below only index those; sections A–D are new findings. Every entry was re-verified against the primary documents — text layers cross-checked against page renders wherever digits were at stake (the Catalogue’s Table 1 pages, the Mission Report’s propellant and event tables). Entry status uses four verdicts: conflict (incompatible claims), spread (values differ beyond rounding, origin unclear), referent trap (numbers that look comparable but measure different things), and adjudicated (a measurement in this library settles it).

Sources are abbreviated: MR = Mission Report (Nov 1969); PSR = Preliminary Science Report (1969; ch. 2 is the crew’s own account, ch. 3 the field-geology team, ch. 4 soil mechanics, ch. 5 the LRL preliminary examination); Cat. = Lunar Sample Information Catalogue (JSC 12522, 1977); Comp. = Lunar Sample Compendium (2009–2011); Debrief = Technical Crew Debriefing (Jul 31 1969); LROC = the 2011 NAC frame as measured in The last three minutes.

A. The landing-site geometry

A1. How far is West crater? — adjudicated, and the adjudication has a twist. The famous stand-off is stated two incompatible ways within the 1969 record:

Source	Claim
PSR ch. 3 (printed p. 42)	landed “approximately 400 m west of” West crater
MR §11 (pp. 11-3, 11-7)	“About 400 meters east of the landing point”
PSR ch. 4 (printed p. 102)	the LM sat “approximately 130 m north and 600 m west of West Crater”
LROC, measured	descent stage 564 m west, 113 m north of the crater center (≈575 m line-of-sight; ≈490 m to the rim crest)

The 2011 measurement adjudicates for PSR ch. 4 — almost exactly (within ~40 m / 17 m). The twist: when The last three minutes found the “about 400 meters” short, it framed the true distance as something only the orbital photograph could supply. In fact the correct figure was in the 1969 record all along, in the soil-mechanics chapter — the geology chapter and the Mission Report simply carried a different, rounder, wronger number, and it is the 400 m that the wiki (and fifty years of secondary literature) inherited. An addendum now points there from that analysis.

A2. How big is West crater? — spread, measurement favors 180 m. “Approximately 180 m in diameter and 30 m deep” (PSR ch. 3; MR §11) vs. “approximately 200 m in diameter” (PSR ch. 4; Cat. p. 10: “a young ray crater approximately 200 meters in diameter”). LROC rim-to-rim measurement: ~160–190 m.

A3. How far does the ejecta apron reach? — spread. “Extends almost symmetrically outward approximately 250 m from the rim crest” (PSR ch. 3; MR §11) vs. “ejecta… extending 100 to 200 m from the crater rim” (PSR ch. 4; likewise the crew’s in-flight description quoted in MR §11.2). The LROC brightness profile (apron onset ≈ 440 m from the LM along the baseline, rim ≈ 490 m) is consistent with the smaller figure on that line but does not trace the full apron.

A4. Where did Eagle land? — conflict, unresolved in-library. MR (§3, printed p. 3-2; §5.4) places touchdown at 0°41′15″ N, 23°26′ E (= 0.688° N, 23.433° E). PSR ch. 4 (printed p. 102) places it at 0.67° N, 23.49° E. The longitudes differ by ~0.057° — about 1.7 km on the lunar surface — and the latitudes by ~500 m. Both cannot be right; the library’s LROC product is a display crop without embedded georeferencing, so the conflict stands unadjudicated here. (MR §11.5 separately claims the landing point was fixed “to within about 8 meters” relative to local features — precision relative to landmarks coexisting with kilometer-scale disagreement in absolute coordinates.)

B. The sample masses

The five-decade paper trail gives the returned haul at least four totals and the bulk sample five:

B1. Total returned — spread. “Approximately 20 kg” (PSR ch. 1, printed p. 5) vs. “22 kg, of which 11 kg were rock fragments… and 11 kg were smaller particulate material” (PSR ch. 5, printed p. 124; MR §11.3 verbatim the same) vs. the Catalogue’s weighed grand total 21,836.086 g (Table 1 totals box, render-verified). The wiki’s cautious “~20–22 kg” spans the spread; the Catalogue’s gram-level figure is the curated weighing and should be preferred.

B2. Bulk sample — five values. “Approximately 10 kg” planned (PSR ch. 1) → “approximately 16 kg” (PSR ch. 3 sampling log, printed p. 55) vs. “approximately 14 kg” (PSR ch. 5, printed p. 113) vs. “14.6 kg” (PSR ch. 5 p. 124; MR §11.3) vs. “15 kg of rock and soil” (Cat. p. 14 narrative) vs. 14,897.4 g (Cat. Table 1 totals, render-verified). The weighed figure again wins; the ch. 3 “16 kg” is the outlier.

B3. Documented box — spread. “6.0 kilograms” of rocks (PSR ch. 5 p. 124; MR §11.3), “about 6 kilograms” of grab samples (MR §11.2; Cat. p. 14), “about 15 pounds [6.8 kg] of additional lunar samples” (MR §13, printed p. 13-2) vs. the Catalogue’s weighed box total 5,923.396 g including cores, fines, and the gas-reaction cell — the rocks alone are 5,419 g. None of the 1969 round numbers survives the weighing exactly.

B4. Contingency sample — spread. “Approximately 1.4 kg” (PSR ch. 3 sampling log, printed p. 55) vs. “approximately 1.03 kilograms” (MR §11.2) vs. 1,015.29 g weighed (Cat.). The ch. 3 figure is ~38 % high — possibly bag-inclusive, but no source says so.

B5. Individual samples — four genuine conflicts (render-verified both sides). Comparing every Compendium dossier header against the Catalogue’s Table 1 “original weight” for all 53:

Sample	Compendium	Catalogue Table 1	Note
10021	255 g	250.0 g	2 %
10025	8.1 g	8.59 g	6 %
10070	60.1 g	64.0 g	6 %
10094	30.3 g	25.0 g	*21 % — and the later* figure is larger, which allocation losses cannot explain**

(Rounding-level differences — 10029 5.5/5.53, 10045 185/185.5, 10091 24/23.9, 10093 25.8/26.0 — are not counted. All other 45 masses agree exactly.)

B6. The drive tubes — a documented correction chain. The Compendium’s own dossiers record that “the initial weight of 10004 given in the catalog (and Lunar Sourcebook!) is 51 g” against the accepted 44.8 g, and that 10005 was catalogued at 65 g against 53.4 g — “apparently 15.5 grams fell out of the cap when this core was first opened (there is confusion about this).” The 1977 Catalogue carries the corrected values.

Context, not conflict: the Press Kit (pp. 45, 51) promised capacity for “as much as 130 pounds” (~59 kg) — the mission returned about a third of that.

C. Where did the documented sampling happen? — conflict (north vs. south)

The mission’s least-documented collection also has the most contradictory location record:

Source	Where
PSR ch. 2 — the crew’s own account (printed p. 38)	“The first few rocks were collected from the surface and subsurface 15 to 20 ft north of the LM”
PSR ch. 3 traverse map (fig. 3-16), as transferred onto the photo-map	documented-sample ellipse north-northeast of the LM
MR §11.2 (printed p. 11-10)	“collected out to a distance of 10 to 15 meters in the area south of the lunar module and near the east rim of the large double crater”
Cat. p. 14	”in the area south of the +Z-axis footpad near the east rim of the large double crater”

North versus south is not a rounding error. A partial reconciliation is possible — the core tubes were driven “in the vicinity of the Solar Wind Composition experiment” (the loop, 111:19:19; MR §11.2), and an ellipse drawn around cores-plus-rocks would smear across both sides — but the crew’s “north” and the MR/Catalogue “south… near the double crater” describe the rocks, and directly contradict. Unresolved; the LROC trails do not discriminate at this scale. The photo-map’s documented-sample ellipse should carry this caveat.

D. Counts, trips, and referent traps

D1. Bulk-sample trips — conflict (memory vs. film). The Debrief (§10): “20 trips back and forth.” The Catalogue’s frame-by-frame film analysis (p. 14): “nine trips back to the MESA… The total number of scoops was 22 or 23” (MR §11.1.6 agrees: “the large scoop was used about 22 times”). Eleven-day memory versus the sequence film — the film wins.

D2. “Nine scoops” — a referent slip inside the Compendium. The 10084 dossier opens: “nine scoops of soil were added to ALSRC#1003.” The film analysis says nine trips and 22–23 scoops. The Compendium has compressed the two numbers into one wrong statement — worth knowing, since the 10084 dossier is the most-cited soil reference.

D3. How many samples did Apollo 11 return? — referent trap. “A total of 48 rocks” (Cat. p. 29 — rocks > 1 cm) vs. “53 samples” (the Compendium dossier count the wiki uses — rocks plus soils, cores, and splits) vs. ~65 generic numbers (Cat. Table 1 — including fines splits, the gas-reaction cell, and pieces renumbered later). All correct; none comparable. Any future article quoting a count should name the referent.

D4. What is 10072? — classification drift. Cat. Table 1 lists 10072 as “Gabbro”; the Compendium classifies it an ilmenite basalt (high-K) — and notes the same era mislabeled its kin (“Smith et al. (1970) and others mistakenly refer to [10047] as a ‘micrograbbro’”). The 1977 label preserves a superseded petrology.

E. Transcription divergences — already filed, indexed here

Catalogued in One moment, three records and The last three minutes, and filed into GOSS NET 1 and related concepts: “Kicking up some dust” (GOSS) vs. “Picking up some dust” (DSE); the contested “(A)”/“a” small step, flagged on the GOSS page itself; “CONTACT LIGHT” existing only in GOSS while the DSE carries “SHUTDOWN”; the DSE’s “Okay, Ed” (no Ed aboard — verified against the original typescript); and the DSE’s final “20 feet” altitude call below GOSS’s last “30 feet.”

F. Memory vs. record — already filed, indexed here

Catalogued in Memory vs. record: the redesignation distance grown to “a half mile” by 2001 (vs. ~1,100 ft flown, MR §5.3 — and note PSR ch. 2’s contemporaneous “a few hundred yards farther west,” which sits between them); the program alarms’ seriousness; the dropped scientific-value motive for the crater approach. D1 above adds a 1969-vintage memory case — the Debrief’s “20 trips” was already off eleven days after the film was shot.

What the wiki should do about it

Prefer the weighed Catalogue figures for all masses (gram-level, 1977) over the 1969 round numbers; the sample inventory and collection concepts’ “~20–22 kg” can tighten to “21.84 kg weighed (Cat.), reported as 20–22 kg across the 1969 sources.”
Replace “~400 m east” with the measured/PSR-ch.4-corroborated geometry (≈490 m rim / ≈575 m center) in LROC imaging, powered descent, Tranquility Base, and field geology — noting the 1969 record carried both values.
Add the north-vs-south caveat to the photo-map’s documented-sample ellipse and the field geology concept.
Flag the Debrief’s “20 trips” quote in the collection concept with the film-analysis count.
Carry the four per-sample mass conflicts (B5) and the 10072 label drift (D4) as notes in the sample inventory.
Leave A4 (coordinates) open as a known conflict; record it in the Tranquility Base article rather than silently choosing a value.

Method

Every cited value was read from the primary documents: PSR chapter attributions confirmed from chapter title pages (ch. 2 p. 35, ch. 4 p. 102 of the print pagination); MR statements from §3, §5, §11, §13 text layers; the Catalogue’s Table 1 masses and totals box verified on 170-dpi page renders (which also corrected an OCR ghost — sample 10001 is 181.9 g, not “1819,” making the Catalogue’s own totals internally consistent); all 53 Compendium header masses extracted programmatically and compared. LROC figures carry over from the measured reconstruction, method documented there.