If man really travelled to the moon...?

Question

...which I believe is the case, why can't the Hubble telescope, which can see into the next galaxy, or some other powerful telescope, be pointed at the moon to show pictures of the lunar module remnants there?? Wouldn't that prove once and for all that the '60's lunar landings were real?

Answer 1

Hubble telescope's resolution is just not high enough. And it's the best telescope we have today. Viewing stuff from the earth is even worse because of the atmosphere.

When we land on the Moon again, we can then check if the old traces and the flag are still there.

Answer 2

If man really traveled to the moon that long ago why have they done nothing else since.it never happened. it was a big "feel good" stunt to cheer america up at that time.

Answer 3

without going into the sheer physics side of things. As powerful the telescope it is, it doesn't work like that. The resolution on a pixel to it's best would give you a blob on your screen of about 200 feet wide. 200 feet in one pixel, there's no way you could tell.

Sorry to dissapoint, us humans funnily enough don't have the technology to do that lol.

Answer 4

Lets do a quick back of an envelope calculation here.  If we had a camera that could resolve an object 10 metres across on the moons surface, what size object could it resolve at a distance of 10 metres (i.e. at the opposite side of a classroom).

From basic trigonometry for a right angled triangle

tan(theta) = 0.005 / 380000

so x = 0.01 * (0.005 / 380000)

x = 0.000000000132m

   = 1.32e-10m

   = 1.32 Angstroms

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Just to give you a sense of scale, a telescope capable of resolving an object 10m across sat on the surface of the moon wouldn't just be able to pick out individual sand grains in the mortar holding the bricks together in the classroom wall.  It would probably be able to resolve the atoms making up the grain of sand.

Think about it for a second.  A telescope that can resolve objects so small that we currently need electron microscopes sat in temperature controlled, vibration free laboratories to be able to look at them.

Maybe in 20, 50 years time telescopes will exist capable of making such measurements, but at the moment it just simply isn't possible.

Answer 5

The brightness of the Moon would obscure the the remnants. But if we send an orbiter to photograph the surface, we would see them!

Answer 6

I'm not sure about anything having to do with telescopes, but I recommend you read the book "Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle Blowers" by Mary Bennett.  It deals with a lot of conspiracy theories i think you would find interesting. Here are some of the ideas covered in the book:

*Was Neil Armstrong really the first man on the moon?

* Was a second craft going to the moon at the same time as Apollo 11?

* Is lethal radiation prevalent throughout deep space?

* What is wrong with the official account of the Apollo 13 accident?

* Was the live color TV feed from the moon not really live?

* Is it true that the lunar surface camera had no viewfinder?

Answer 7

Good point. I think they have already.  

Answer 8

I'm sure it could be done, but it really is a complete waste of time. The HST is heavily over-subscribed. Why would any scientist worth their salt go to the bother of trying to prove something which doesn't need proving? Are there expeditions being planned to "prove" that the Earth is not flat? Of course not. It's simply a tiny minority of gullible, misinformed and stupid people that question the reality of the Apollo moon missions. They can go to h**l as far as I care. I hope that not one penny is wasted trying to argue with these cretins.

Answer 9

good idea lets get it sorted, I believe they landed, that many people couldn't lie for so long without the truth getting out.

Answer 10

While such an image has little or no scientific value, it should have PR value.

I'd thought that the Navy Clementine orbiter had made the attempt - and got some sort of shadow.  Doesn't look like much.

The ground based twin Keck telescopes have demonstrated interferometry.  With that they should be able to increase their resolution by a factor of 10.   They are 10 meter telescope with 100 meter separation.  You can't do adaptive optics to get around the problem of looking through the atmosphere, but you should be able to do "lucky imaging".  The idea is that you take thousands of very short images.  Some of them will be good.  You can't track the Moon, so, you'll have to guess where it is.  It may be enough.

The VLT has also demonstrated interferometry, and the separations are longer.  The ESA did say that they would try to do it one day.  I've not heard anything from them.

You don't actually want to do this at the full moon. You want local contrast.  So, there is a specific time each month for each site that is best.  Probably local morning or night at the site.

So this isn't something that can be done with the expensive telescope time during a full moon when other observations are more difficult.

Answer 11

To answer the first question, try this. Take a pair of 10x50 binoculars and put a news paper down on the table. Now find the letter E while standing over the paper. Of course you would only see a blur. If it could focus in you would resolve of about 300 feet.

For the second question about finding the flag, the atmosphere of Earth is not clear enough to allow that kind of resolution for an object that small. This is known as "seeing." Add to that, the fact that the Moon (from over 200,000 miles away) itself subtends only about 1 degree in our night sky and the flag is even smaller (very much smaller) than that! You would almost literally be looking for a needle in a haystack. While the technology we have today is awesome, we still have not reached anything with the kind of capability you are suggesting. Maybe someday though.

Answer 12

We know the landings happened because astronomers bounce lasers off of special mirror boxes left behind by the Apollo astronauts to measure the Earth-Moon distance.  And they brought large amounts of moonrock back with them.

Answer 13

let's say they can. (they can't but lets pretend)

tomorrow, Scientific American publishes a special edition about the new "Apollo pics".

Knowing how totally GOOFY the people are that think the Moon landing didn't happen, what do you think the response would be?

1) the Scientific American people are in on it.

2) the landing crafts were placed there later...

3) as soon as the next History Channel show tells me what to think, I will get back with you.

Answer 14

You would need a massive telescope to achieve the resolution needed to see the lunar module.  I came across a link a while back that explains this in more detail, I'll try and find it for you.

Edit:  Not the link I originally found, but it's basically the same  http://calgary.rasc.ca/moonscope.htm

Answer 15

because the remnants left on the moon are too small, even to be seen by Hubble. You have to consider the pixel size of Hubbles resolution, and then you would realise that something at 250,000 miles away would need to be bigger than a football field to show.

The stuff Hubble sees from deep space is in reality huge by comparison ie the size of a galaxy!

Answer 16

1. I thank the teleskope wood bern out kauz the moon overlode the sensers (its 2 brite).

I herd sum stars R 2 brite.  Em hafta be kareful tu avoid brite stars.

2. Yu shood remember in the 1960's it took us 6 yeers tu gotu the moon, & we had tu lern evreethang on the fli.

NASA's latest plan tu go bak sez it will take 15 yeers & its behind skedule.

Answer 17

they did land on the moon, one needs to also appreicate a lot of secrecy was in the air due to the cold war etc with Russia..

an umanned probe smashed into the moon not long ago, it was a controlled landing....

Answer 18

To this day they still fire laser pulses at the refractors the Astronauts left behind to get an acurate distance from earth to moon.

Answer 19

Because these galaxies are huge! Most are over 100,000 in diameter! Its easy to spot those. As for the moon there are a couple problems...

1. The Apollo landing craft is way too small relative to the size of the moon. Way too small.

2. Its hard for us to even find a position to point the telescope. Although we have a rough idea on where the landings were, we don't know the exact coordinates.

There are some images showing what might be an image of Apollo-17 on the moon taken by the Hubble but they are way too small for us to make out. Look at some of the links provided.

EDIT: As for the ground based telescopes, if Hubble can't see it, then there is no way an observatory is going to be able to see it. The most powerful telescope on Earth only gets a football field sized pixel resolution... this means that for every pixel you see when you see a picture of the moon out of this high powered telescope, you are actually seeing a football field size on the moon. So each tiny dot of one color is equivalent to one football field.

Answer 20

Interesting topic..

I guess it could..

Maybe u should forward it to nasa.

:D

Answer 21

It's not the increase telescope science that's required, but the increase in telescope size.  The size of the primary mirror or lens, no matter what it's made of, has the biggest effect how how sharply and clearly you can see something.  The HST's 2.4 meter mirror is simply too small.  Earthbound telescopes have larger mirrors, but are then stymied by atmospheric distortion.

Regarding Percy and Bennett's "Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle Blowers," most of their arguments are refuted at my site, linked below.  Neither author is a space scientist or an historian.  Although massive, weighing in at more than 500 pages, the book doesn't really say much about the Moon landings; it's mostly trying to tie every conspiracy theory on the planet into some (in)coherent whole.

Many years ago I had some public dialogue with Percy, but he has long since stopped responding to readers' questions and comments.  Basically, he's a fraud and it doesn't take long to discover that.  He has no training or experience in science or engineering or photographic analysis, and the "analysis" he does in the book uses purely made-up techniques that might impress a layman but don't really do any science.  Bennett, his co-author, is a self-proclaimed psychic.  The day they stopped taking readers' comments was the day I asked Percy why one of his own photos didn't obey his own "rules" for authentic pictures.  They're quacks and they know it.

Two different independent television producers -- one English and one American -- offered Bennett and Percy the opportunity to defend their findings on-camera against my questions, but they declined both invitations.  (One of those was the National Geographic special some of you have e-mailed me about.)  That didn't stop them from trying to backpedal away from the criticism on their web site (where they control all the content and can avoid dialogue).  But it goes to show you just how interested these authors are in standing by their content.  I.e., not very.

There is no defensible science in "Dark Moon" and its authors simply sit in seclusion and collect the checks.  Their only answer to questions nowadays is, "You must buy both our video and our book in order to understand our point."  No, really.  That's what they say.

Answer 22

There is already footage of Astronauts on the Moon and living people saying that they have been. Against the fact that real people can tell you about being there, any photograph will still not be enough to convince any Doubting Thomases.

Answer 23

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/...

This link provides an image of the Apollo 17 LM. But it's REEEEEEELY tiny.

Answer 24

Exactly, why wouldnt they?

This along with the all the other evidence (just google moon landing fake) kinda makes me believe it dint happen.

Answer 25

The real reason is the moon moves too fast. I know just standing here on earth it doesn't seem like it, but to something as powerful as the Hubble, which is made to look at things thousands or millions of light years away, where the motion is relatively nothing (because of the distance, plus the motion of our own solar system), but the moon is actually travelling at great speed around earth and to try to zoom in THAT close on an object, in relative terms just "inches" away (OK a couple hundred thousand miles) they just can't aim it like that and the optics are all wrong for that kind of work. It's like using a telescope like a microscope, just won't do it.

Answer 26

Only cameras in lunar orbit have the resolving power to image any of the landers, as many have said.  It's much like looking at a road sign in the distance.  You may be able to see it, but to read the sign you must get closer to it, because your eyes cannot see the letters.  If you use binoculars you might be able to read the letters, but you can't see the bolts holding the sign to the pole.  With a telescope you can read it and see the bolts, but you can't tell whether the bolts are round or hexagonal, and so on.  There is a physical limit to optics.

However, there is one source of information that should clear things up a bit.  Apollo 11 left a laser reflector on the moon, designed to allow scientists here on Earth to determine the exact distance to the moon.  I have never seen photographs of the reflected laser 'beam', but I'm sure they exist.

By the way, there are no discrepancies that refute the validity of photographs taken by the astronauts on the moon.  Points about being able to see in shadows do not take into account sunlight reflected by the surface of the moon itself, and points about not being able to see stars in the sky on the moon do not take into account the glare from the lunar surface (which requires the camera to decrease the amount of the light coming in to the light detector to prevent overexposure).  Dust on the moon clearly is seen to travel in a parabolic arc (as it would in the absence of air), and at least one astronaut (John Young, I think) fell in plain view of the camera, and his speed of falling clearly was less than it would have been on Earth (plus he wasn't injured, his suit wasn't damaged, and he had no trouble getting up with 300 or so pounds (mass, not weight) of space suit and attachments).

Answer 27

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins took a infra-red reflector with them in Apollo 11 to be placed on the moon at their landing site for the scientific purpose of reflecting back data to establish progression of the deterioration of the moon's orbit around the earth, which has been established as the moon moving away from earth at 4cm per-year. Therefore, all those that still believe the moon landing was a hoax are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Answer 28

The short answer is that the Apollo hardware on the Moon is too small to make out from Earth even with the biggest and best telescopes ever built. Those things may be close compared to a distant galaxy, but they are of course MUCH smaller too. It is like askying why a person with 20/20 vision cannot count the legs on an ant 50 feet away when that same person can see a distant mountain clearly.

Answer 29

yes, it is possible to our scientists.bcz we are very talented.  

Answer 30

Hubble's resolution is approx. 3.2 x 10^-7 radians.  The smallest object it can "see" on the Moon must be approx. 120 m (roughly the length of a football field).  The landing module is much smaller than that.

By the way, the smallest objects your son's telescope can discern are several kilometers (miles) in size.

Answer 31

The galaxies are distant but vast. The lunar landers are about the size of a pickup truck, but are a quarter of a million miles away. The physics of telescopes means that in order to clearly see something that small at that distance you would need a telescope over a kilometre across. No telescope in existence has the resolution to see the landers.