Moon landing

[mr.bungle]

With all the theories about the moon landing being made up why cant they take photos of the stuff they was meant to have left up there like the moon buggy to proof it?

[heathfield]

What would such a photo prove? There would be people who would say that it was just another fake, not proving anything.

[gobbledegeek]

I guess it would be technically feasible to send a satellite into orbit around the moon to take photographs but it would be damned expensive and what would be the benefit?

[mr.bungle]

Yes but if you can look through a telescope and see mars surely you can look through a telescope and see the stuff they left on there?

[mibn2cweus]

Wanna play hide & seek?

[mibn2cweus]

You will need a telescope at least a hundred times more powerful than this to see anything that small

[mr.bungle]

Right. Are you saying that the technology is not there to take a photo of the moon buggy to prove that the americans landed on the moon?

[jake-the-peg]

Kind of but not a photo.

Three of the Apollo missions left laser reflectors on the moon like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_laser_rangi ng_experiment

Since then hundreds of scientists from all countries have used these to bounce lasers off of the moon and calculate it's distance to within centimeters.

This just would not be possible without the reflectors.

I have pointed this out on a few occasions to conspiracy theorists - unsurprisingly they are not persuaded.

[mr.bungle]

But there must be an observatory somewhere that can look on the moon that you can look through and see the stuff they left on there. I mean you can see mars on a telescope which is obviously much farther away from the moon. So why cant you see the moon buggy on the moon?

[heathfield]

You want to see something about fifteen feet long through a telescope from a distance of 240,000 miles? I don't think so.

[kempie]

Hmmm... no conspiracy theorists have challenged the veracity of those who claim to be able to shine a beam of light at a 1 metre x � metre bike reflector ~385 million metres away (I think that gives a target size measured in millionths of an arcsecond) moving at 0.5 arcseconds per second.

They aren't trying hard enough ;-)

[jake-the-peg]

Perhaps they understand laser beam divergence and realise that the beam's about a mile in diameter when it reaches the moon.

Hmm - maybe not

[heathfield]

Traditional earthbound telescopes have a resolution of around 1.0 arcseconds due to atmospheric disturbance. Hubble's, being in space, is around ten times better at just under 0.1 arcseconds.
By using a system of interferometry combined with computer-controlled flexible mirrors the new European Southern Observatory's VLT (Very Large Telescope) will be comparable to Hubble, with a resolution of around 0.07 arcseconds.
Better still is Sydney University's ground-based Stellar Interferometer which will attain an incredibly fine resolution of 70 micro arcseconds. Wow! That's the width of a human hair at 100 km!
But alas, that's still not good enough to photograph the moon buggy. (I'll let someone else do the math). ;-)

[dzug]

Why should 'they' , whoever 'they' are, care about 'proofing' it?

[SteveD]

Love it, mibn2cweus. Zoom right in and what do you get??

[almcd007]

I'm with you Mr Bungle - If a satelite has a camera on it to take a photo of earth one way like Google earth/Microsoft Realtime - why cant it be done the other way - how come we dont have camera lenses strong enough to see things on the moon. We can see detailed craters from earth with television camera lenses as the camera men often do when nothing is happening at half time on the football or something. There must be something strong enough to take close ups of the moon.

[jake-the-peg]

Because there is a fundamental relationship between the size of a lens and the smallest object it can resolve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolutio n

By my reckoning you'd need a lens nearly 5KM in diameter

[kempie]

Satellite imagery of the Earth is taken at an altitude of around 200 miles. The Moon is more than 1000 times further away.

The clearest satellite/aerial imagery used by Google Earth is at around 0.6 metre resolution.

The Hubble Telescope (as an example of the strongest telescopes which exist) has an optical resolution of .085 arcseconds for visible light which gives a resolution at the Moon's surface of about 150 metres. You need better than 50 metres resolution to be able to detect a town.

[jimmonas]

because of the position of the hubble in space if they turned it around to face the moon it would aslo be facing the sun and that would f**k the mirrors